It's the last thing I wanted to say
by tami3
Summary: Lavi gives up the world. The Noah had it right. After life, after love--it all ends. In the aftermath, the only one that is waiting for him is Kanda. KandaLavi. Complete. Warning-adult content
1. Until you asked me if

It's the last thing I wanted to say.

Part One: Until you asked me if I…

One of Kanda's first clear memories of him was from when they were teenagers. It might just be in his head, nostalgia makings things out to be better than they really were, but in his memory they were young and bright. He remembers that he was willowy like a debutante, which was so humiliating for him at the time that he refused to have his weight recorded even for official physicals.

As for Lavi, he had had his adolescent fitness. It was only Kanda's acute senses that had recorded the visual details for him. Kanda thinks that Lavi had a narrow waist that suited his young-man sized shoulders, and skinny hips. Lavi had been wearing a plain white cotton shirt underneath his black half-jacket uniform, which wrinkled in the bend of his stomach when he leaned over to look into the town square's fountain.

It had been a sunny summery day and they had been out on their first solo mission--meaning no clucking bush-headed Generals or scolding balding mentors at their shoulders, reciting tips for akuma recognition and how to avoid stomach ills on the road.

Kanda and Lavi had been something of a trial case, being the first "children" to be given an assignment for themselves. The three of them, Kanda, Lavi, and Komui, had held a brief meeting in his office beforehand. Back then, Kanda had only known Lavi as the noisy, eye-patched existence dashing through the hallways. He chattered like a manic monkey to many people but had never really bothered Kanda before. But during the mission briefing the redhead had been quiet in his seat, obediently absorbing Komui's orders and his short introduction of Kanda.

The next day Kanda had met the other boy at the train station. Lavi had stood in front of a train billowing steam and smoke behind him. His olive bag had been slung over his shoulder and there had been a shockingly orange scarf looped around his neck, plus a sea-green band wrapping his fiery hair. It had all clashed horribly. Kanda, impeccably unadorned in his black uniform, had snorted without comment. This had made Lavi shrug.

During the train ride, Kanda had heard the words "Bookman apprentice" and "Yuu" for the first time. He let both slide because, for the first matter, he didn't particularly understand or care what a "Bookman apprentice" was. For the second matter, Komui had carelessly used his full name to introduce him, and Lavi had looked to be as much of an ignorant foreigner, oblivious to manners, as the rest of them. Although vaguely disgusted, in small part because he was a motion sick, Kanda had left both alone, figuring it didn't matter much. Both turned out to be lifelong mistakes.

But even with those memories, Lavi looking into the fountain left a far more vivid impression. The town they were staying in hadn't been particularly wealthy, but it had been clean and pleasant. There were blooming flower boxes in the windows of stone house fronts, which all opened up to rustic kitchens. Dried meats hung from the ceiling, hand-knitted lace tablecloths were laid on hand-carved tables, and local pottery sat on the counters. The fountain had been a modest one, a simple stone circle with a burbling basin in the center and spotlessly clean water jetting in arcs behind him and catching the light.

What Kanda remembered was Lavi's face coming up to this background. His green eyes had been bright in the day, and he had had a close-lipped smile and small imperfections on his skin. The white of the houses' stones were bleached so clean that they glowed under the sun, and all the overbearing colors he had in his clothes and himself had come together with the backdrop of the town.

The mission had been as much of a disaster as possible without being an outright failure. During their first fight Kanda hadn't watched Lavi's back. Lavi had ended up with a limp that took weeks to go away. After they barely recovered the innocence from an abnormally cunning porcupine, Lavi took it for safekeeping.

Kanda helped him hobble back to the inn, but he still mostly forgot to look after his injured comrade. Lavi hid with their prize in the room while his partner battled the rest of the akuma in the streets.

When their leader came for Lavi in aproned human form, (Kanda let her pass with a weepy story about her missing father) Lavi had climbed to the roof through the window, bad leg and all. He'd shouted for Kanda when he saw him down below, but Kanda hadn't heard him because he was recovering from his first ever akuma bite and unhappily stabbing the lot of them. Lavi had gotten himself down by slamming his hammer right into the fountain and sliding down in a shower of white marble bits.

That was a long, long time ago. Komui had bleakly let it go as rookies' mistakes, but they weren't rookies' mistakes. They were soldier's faults that never got fixed. Kanda still left people behind. He almost let a clown eat Allen on his debut mission. Lavi was an incorrigible destroyer. When he first met Allen he wrecked half the town rendezvousing with the rest of the Cross group.

Kanda wrote it off as Allen being a bad luck charm. Lavi laughed, but he never made any excuses.

Kanda knew the Order was still working on shushing up anyone who still remembers that little town.

---

Lavi has always liked Kanda in one way or another. Blasé admiration at first, because he was a lot of things. A prodigy swordsman. Foul-mouthed with a terrible temper and with no restraint in anything he did, like he feared nothing.

Lavi always held back--at his worst, he could go into a snit of I'm-above-this politeness. Hell, when he was pissed he had the most vulgar curses available in fifteen languages. But Bookman taught him better than that. He told Lavi, only two types of people get into passionate fights. Enemies, and friends. Lavi knew better than to rack up the first kind, and the other kind…well, his friendliness was so perfect that he never fought with his "friends". That was what made it artificial. He didn't have to consider anyone his friend or enemy.

Kanda, however, was natural in his open disdain for everyone. One part of Lavi was vain, the Bookman in him floating proud above screaming human nonsense. The other part hates how he feels like such a coward from backing down from too strong of a display. That part noticed Kanda right away.

And of course, one could never discount being unreservedly handsome. They're the same age, but Kanda never lacked for the incredible good looks that could have easily reeled in the snooty girls. They were the knowingly beautiful kind that made faces at Lavi when he was in his bad complexion and overgrown feet stage.

Lavi supposes he's okay now; plenty of people tell him he's "cute". But Kanda's beauty is like the sun. A million words have been spent describing it, even though it is so basic, so taken for granted.

So it's perfectly understandable that Lavi has always found him interesting. All that baiting his ego and Kanda has never once fallen for it. He's mean. In fact, he's horrible. But there's too much about him that strikes right at the heart of people's weaknesses. Because he is strong, other exorcists have tried to surpass him; when that inevitably fails, they try to befriend him, so they can feel like they are a part of something powerful. Because he's lovely, people make up excuses for his behavior so they can keep admiring him without guilt.

It's easy enough of a trap to believe these compliments, which are at their core, lies. Kanda could have been an idol. He could have let some girl convince him she loved him. But Kanda cursed at those weaker, sneered at his admirers' shallowness. What Lavi recognized as discipline the others called cruelty so that they could pretend that they'd always known that. They would maintain that they never sought him out, but that he had made victims out of all of them. Word got out that he was hunting them down one by one.

People were so incredibly pitiful. Lavi has dissected and accepted this since he was a child. For Kanda, Lavi's senses that it's always been innate knowledge. He hates people too, the very idea of them. The difference is that Lavi's training has given him mastery over it. He can hide his disgust behind a smile and, rarely, let himself love something. Like knowledge. Like the poetry of a fleeting tender moment adrift in the waves of monsters. But Kanda's wordless frustration makes him lash out in ways that are ugly to everyone else. This too, Lavi has always seen.

That's the reason why he alone always got along with Kanda. Kanda had been soundly convinced that he was a moron from the very beginning--at least, in any way that'll matter. There were times, when Lavi was sitting quietly, listening to him shout about another shortcoming of the people around him, that Kanda would stop and stare. Nothing else, just a moment's pause. Lavi would let those times slip by because he knows Kanda's instincts are animalistic; far better a human's, but incoherent.

Lavi would like to think the closest verbal description for what happen in those moments is Kanda realizing that someone actually understands him--but it doesn't matter in the least because it goes unsaid. Lavi hopes that this never changes, because sometimes he's a bit bratty for a mere apprentice and oversteps Bookman's teachings. He likes to think that these things--intangible, inexpressible exchanges--are really what makes people friends.

This ended when he found out about Kanda.

---

Lavi was having a horrible night. The ark was finally up and running; it was a secret boon for the Bookman clan, having two insiders with full access to the very latest in travel technology. Exorcists were free to use it as they wished, and Bookman wasted no time sending him out to those once exhaustingly far centers of wisdom. Unfortunately for Lavi, he was going a bit crazy at the moment for it.

He had just come back from memorizing the libraries of Washington D.C when Komui all but caught him by the collar coming out of the ark and threw him on a boat with Kanda for a mission in Spain. Bookman had had but a minute to yell at him from a second story window that if he didn't have all "the government workings of a critically avant-garde country" transcribed by the time he came back, his hide was forfeit.

So Lavi ran in and out of doors, slaughtering level twos like a madman with Kanda before dashing off to stack more writing on the temporary work station in his room. Kanda would scream at him to be of more help cleaning up the small fry. Bookman would scream at him over a golem to start sending research through mail if he had to. The potent local coffee made him both industrious and nervous. His sleep cycle being severely disrupted from instantly crossing the world didn't help things.

By the third day, the situation on site had become a little less dire, but Bookman was getting increasingly agitated over the phone. The upshot of it was that Lavi decided to ditch patrol. Kanda stuck his head in through the doorway well after midnight to say some choice words before slamming the door so hard it shed dust. As for Lavi, he found that he had gotten sick of the inn's resident rooster scaring him witless at seven am every morning, when he got his best work done. So long before sunrise, unbeknownst to the innkeepers, he snuck the bird in and stuffed it under his unused bed to trick it into thinking that day was never coming.

Unfortunately, the rooster had its own plans. It wriggled out from the bundle of sheets well before dawn. Since Lavi had at least seven candles in lamps burning, it decided that it was plenty bright enough to be day. Lavi nearly fell out his chair when the animal started crowing hysterically at, according to Lavi's watch, four instead of seven.

Lavi lost a sheet of parchment to an uncontrolled streak of his quill, but instead of lamenting he doubled over laughing. He was giddy from his wildly beating heart, the caffeine, and a very upset animal bouncing off the walls of his room. After he calmed down, he chased the poor bird through a storm of glossy feathers and tossed it out the night-dark window. He watched it fly back to its precious hens, settling on the top of the chicken house. It seemed very uneasy about where the sun had gone.

After Lavi pulled the shutters closed, the guilt started kicking in. The insanity of the rooster had practically given him a heart attack, but it also broken him out of his Bookman work trance. He'd have to apologize to the owners for the inn for waking them up so early. But first, it was undeniable truth that he really had been being an ass to have as a partner for this mission. Kanda had already been out late covering for him, even if he had gotten mad about it. Now the aforementioned ungrateful co-worker had unleashed unholy racket on him while the stars were still out high in the sky. Kanda was going to kill him. Lavi was surprised he wasn't already hewing chunks out of his room door.

To preempt the murder attempt, Lavi plodded barefoot down the halls to Kanda's room, figuring he might as well pop in and tell Kanda that he didn't have to disembowel him because he knew what he did, and would make up for it by finishing the rest of the mission himself so Kanda cold just sleep in, blah blah…The town they were in was relatively large this time around, so the inn was nice. Big. Kanda's room was up a floor.

When Lavi reached Kanda's door, he heard a few soft words in sleepy Spanish. Lavi wrinkled his nose. It was more his thing than Kanda's to pick up the local language. He tested the door, and since it was unlocked, didn't bother knocking. It would only give Kanda the heads up to prepare sharp and pointy things. Lavi was just going to say his piece and run.

The person lying on the side the bed that Lavi could see was not Kanda. He was a native with dark skin and darker curls, big eyes lidded with drowsiness. He looked young. Younger than Lavi. He rubbed at his face, squinting through the darkness and muttering quiet questions. Lavi cringed at his mistake and was about to shut the door with an apology when he noticed a lily-white arm draped around the young man's waist.

Lavi was paralyzed for valuable seconds. He couldn't stop himself witnessing Kanda sitting up to stare at him, the stranger rising with him with a yawn.

Through some unconscious sense of self-preservation, Lavi began backing out. Then he began to run. He was halfway down the stairs before he felt Kanda grab him by his hair from behind. Kanda always was inhumanly fast. Lavi sat down against the wall hard, throwing trembling hands up to his mouth. Kanda had Mugen in his free hand, the sheath left behind. The blade shone with it's own light, illuminated in the pitch black of the sleeping house.

"Aa….aah." Lavi gasped in wordless terror.

"Not a sound." Kanda hissed at him. Lavi could feel the sword edge pressing into a vital vein in his neck. His eye widened. The slightest bit more pressure and he was a dead man. This was no joke.

For several long moments Kanda's eyes glinted at him while Lavi shook, lowering his gaze. He could feel the uncontrollable rash of heat starting to spread across his face. Kanda's grip tightened in reaction. Finally, Kanda took the katana away, but his hand viciously jerked at Lavi's hair so he couldn't avoid looking at him in the eyes.

"You tell no one." he whispered, his voice deadly cold. When Lavi said nothing, he slid his hand around Lavi's throat in warning.

"No. I won't." Lavi blurted out, startled at how loud he sounded.

"Shut up!" Kanda snarled at him lowly.

"I-I'm sorry! M' so sorry! Y-Yuu…" Lavi stammered, but keeping it quiet. Kanda threw him off violently, so that Lavi hit the wooden paneling with a thump.

He stood. In the dim lighting Lavi could see the sculpted shapes of his back--the long curve down the middle, the sharp shoulder blades. He was wearing sleeping shorts, which he must have quickly pulled on. Without another word, he started climbing the stairs, leaving Lavi sprawled on the steps.

"Y-Yuu?"

Kanda stopped halfway to the top. "What is it?" his words carried toneslessly.

"W-who was that?"

Kanda's chin moved to the side, almost as if looking back, but Lavi couldn't see his face.

"I don't remember his name, if that's what you're asking."

Then he had went back to his room. Lavi sat on the steps for a long time, biting his lip and thinking about what he didn't understand. It was only after he heard the rooster crowing again that he picked himself up, went back to his room to grab his hammer, and went outside to make the last of the mission rounds.

Kanda didn't join him.

---

Afterwards, things were sickeningly normal. Lavi silently listened to Kanda's calm explanation as he sat on Kanda's bed back at headquarters. Kanda was surprisingly frank.

Twenty-six. The two of them this year. They were twenty-six. Lavi gnawed at his fingernails and looked out at nothing.

Kanda didn't actually say it but it was close enough.

"I've never liked women." was how he put it. This prompted an internal review of every female encounter that Lavi has been there for. He recalls nothing like revulsion or awkwardness. Just cold-hearted, unreceptive….sexless…Kanda.

Lavi glumly spat a chewed-off cuticle into his hand. "How long? And…how?" Lavi asked him queasily, unsure of whether he wanted to hear any more.

"Christ." Kanda muttered. He braced his arms on the window sill and glowered out. "I don't know. Years now. I only do it on missions, and not every mission. I meet them, and then--" Kanda's mouth twisted into an expression of spite as he tossed contemptuous eyes over his shoulder. "Fuck, Lavi. How do you think I do it? How do you do it?"

Lavi stared meekly at his toes. "I don't."

That wiped the menace completely off of Kanda's face for the first time. Lavi wrapped his arms around himself and looked to the side.

He talked a good game, but the thing was, the Bookman clan was actually a monastic order. It was simple fact that sex made things complicated. People remembered you because of it. They started problems with you because of it. An ironically large portion of Bookman training was spent dealing with something that was supposed to be absent from a majority of their lives.

Most who joined the order had already known carnal knowledge, Bookman said. Few minds could be discerned to be worthy at an age when it could be reasonably expected that the candidate was a virgin. Youth itself was foolishness and daring. Men learned with age, but despite that the craving for the old pleasures of the flesh tainted the clarity of their minds.

But there were methods. Lust was a supposed irrepressible human problem. They sought to overcome those, just like the rest of it. Violence. Greed. The like. Bookmen were human but they aimed to surpass as many petty human limitations as possible. They did this by through mental discipline. Mental discipline could triumph over intrinsic vulgarities.

Lavi had been practically a baby when he came into the clan, making him unique. He had been special, with his eye that seemed to see everything and understand everything in its entirety immediately. They had to take him on. Bookman had been practical and made abstinence an objective lesson to learn, like any other. After all, at that age Lavi hadn't known any better. It was slightly different story when Lavi hit puberty, but not significantly so. After all, hadn't Bookman taught him serenity and contentment when he was at an age when he should have been throwing tantrums about sweets? Hadn't he learned neutrality and justice when normal children were banding together into factions and waging private wars? Such impulses could be soothed with the right kind of meditation.

There were, Bookman had told him thoughtfully, ways to have intercourse. There were…special men and women, associated with the clan. Enlightened. Made wise, through much study and training, with strict codes and a long-standing internalization of the grave importance of the Bookman creed. The body is not an enemy, Bookman had elaborated. Such people helped Bookmen understand their physicality without draining their mental energies. They understood Bookmen priorities and were usually scholars themselves.

They weren't numerous. But they existed, and they could be found. The Bookman seeking them had to properly trained, and not stupid enough to do something ridiculous like get attached. It was considered a privilege to meet with them. But it was an unspoken rule of sorts that no one could have separated emotion from sexual desire before a certain age. In the clan, your thirties made you young. But your twenties made you a baby.

"Still," Bookman had said. "I understand if you feel unhappy there is no one else like you in the clan in this aspect. This may not be a comfort to you for some time, if ever at all, but know that you won't always be the odd one. Those who understand our clan do not judge things like experience."

And this had been enough for Lavi at age eight, ten, twelve, when he was only just starting to understand it, but only as a mysterious, surreally distant thing. The promise of being included someday was enough for him. In the meantime, he meditated like he had been taught.

And then they had joined the Order.

The problem with interacting people outside the clan was that they didn't understand this philosophy. Bookman had warned Lavi that the Order had many young people who would understand in some rude form that a being that wasn't sexual wasn't really human. They needed to blend in without actually blending. Incorporate it in your personality, but don't believe it, had been his orders. It would be a gruesome challenge.

"This" he had said grimly, "Might be the most difficult obstacle you ever encounter in your training." Lavi had bowed his head humbly, but something in him had actually wanted that to be the case. Bookman saying it would be hard was practically an invitation to experiment, since some failure would be forgiven.

Only, it wasn't like that. When he came to the Order, everyone and everything was so very, very sad. Everyone he met was a living tragedy, a masterpiece like a Shakespearean play.

There were times when he was mad with himself. He tried to make himself feel something. He overcompensated with sexy remarks. He had moments of raging want for beautiful Lenalee, for voluptuous akuma women. There was always the initial surge of excitement. (Sometimes, he wryly thought that he'd come up with a way to mediate himself into desire, not out.) But his mind always overrode it when their stories came out. Their histories.

There were a million things to learn, see, admire and pity in the Order. And he found, to his shock, that sex wasn't such a big deal. It never was.

When he had told Bookman this, Bookman had only nodded. But Lavi had caught the gleam in the old man's eye that only came around with an especially exciting nugget of knowledge. Lavi had rested his hands during their break in the library and sighed, wondering about the old man's story and how Bookman once told him that the word prodigy was carefully avoided when speaking of any Bookman, since they were all exemplary. "You…" he had started, and then abruptly changed the subject.

Of course, Lavi didn't tell Kanda all this. He mumbled something about being raised by monks, which was true enough. His face was burning. Kanda was staring.

He'd never been ashamed of this before. But he suddenly felt so childish before his childhood friend, who turned out be anything but a child. But Kanda shook his head at him.

"So." Kanda raised an appraising eyebrow at him. "You don't care about sexuality?"

Lavi grappled for moment whether he meant sexuality, lust sexuality, or sexuality, gender preference sexuality. But the he decided that it didn't really make a difference. In any sense. The answer was the same.

"No." he answered. He didn't think his blush could get any worse. If Kanda was asking the right question, Lavi had just outed himself as…not really normal. A pure Bookman, which right this second made him sad about the loss of his humanity. This was Kanda, his so-human, so-admired…whatever he was. Lavi didn't fight with him or understand him, so who knew about being friends? Who knew about anything now that he knew about Kanda?

Kanda evaluated him with a long, hard, look. But in the end he let Lavi go without another word.

More time passed. Kanda started doing things when he was on missions with Lavi. Nothing that Lavi could call obscene. Maybe not even definitively real. But Lavi was uneasily aware when Kanda put coins straight into the hand of the merchant with the high cheekbones instead of on the countertop. That he nodded curtly at the one street performer with the piercing hazel eyes even though the entire colorful group shouted warm hellos to everyone in the street.

He sometimes got separate rooms for them even if one already had two beds.

Lavi didn't say anything.

---

It was Kanda's guess that probably someone knew about what he did. But it was also his guess that the days of the Church of raining trails and executions on heretic soldiers were over. Somewhere along the way it had accepted its desperate need for sound, innocence-compatible bodies. As long as the sodomites and et cetera sinners in their fold were inconspicuous about it, they remained on the payroll.

For example, when Allen and Lenalee started having pre-marital sex, nobody cared.

Maybe it was because their romance was far from mesmerizingly pretty. When it fell far short of storybook perfect, people were a little surprised. Not so surprised either, because Allen and Lenalee were too old by then. Not by much, but their chance for a magically stupid sixteen-year-old and thirteen-year-old Romeo-and-Julietesque youth-driven affair had passed them by. (Likely during the period they were all being chased base to base by particularly fickle Earl.)

Komui had staged dramatic hair-tearing seizures at first, but after being efficiently ignored by his sister and her boyfriend, that had stopped. While they were in their early twenties, they had quietly admitted to being together to the rest of the Order, apathetic Generals and Vatican representatives included. They still formally had their own rooms, but no one ever checked to make sure both beds were occupied at night, even if Lenalee's was always suspiciously neat.

So for the past few years, Kanda had known them as unmarried husband and wife. No probing investigations so far. No one seemed very interested in tracking how their relationship came about or how it was going. Kanda thought that this was probably the for best and least embarrassing for Allen and Lenalee anyways, because it hasn't always gone that well.

Kanda supposed that it might be because Allen finally lived up to his supposedly Anglo-Saxon bloodline. Once he grew up, you could finally believe that he really was descended from one of the war-burly Norman invaders that crossed the English channel to seize it for their William-the-Bastard turned William-the-Conqueror commander. He lost the bizarre same-build same-sweet-faced-innocence matched aesthetic he'd had with Lenalee when they were teenagers. It had always made things too weird, like they were real life versions of raggedy Anne and Andy. Supposed to be a romantic couple but looking like they were brother and sister dabbling in childish incest.

Allen became dashingly tall and strong and as soon as he did he acquired a petite Asian doll lover that he led around. Lenalee was so little next to him that it couldn't look like anything else. Even early on Kanda noticed that sometimes her face would be wary or cross when they were like that. But Allen has never talked about it as far as Kanda knew and Kanda wasn't interested in being the one to ask.

There were good times for them, like the times when she would entrust a china-delicate lady's hand to Allen's much bigger one to go out for nights on the town. Those times were marked by sparkling, swishing white skirts of Allen's favorite white and late night returns. They'd come back bowled over the threshold, tumbling with kisses and laughter even if Kanda was reading in the common room connected to the bedchambers.

But Kanda chooses mostly to think as how premature aging would sometimes wrinkle the corners of Lenalee's narrowed eyes over breakfast plates gone cold. Her mouth would be thinner and older than when she glittered on Allen's arm with a gleam of teeth and rose painted lips. If she had any rosiness during those mornings, it would be in the rims of her eyes and nose.

As for Allen, it would vary. Sometimes he would occupy the chair next to her with the same war-faced stoniness as the English suits of armor in the halls, looking like a stern British king. Sometimes she would be all alone with her cold meal and stiffness, and he would be laughing loudly several tables over with the newer male exorcists, stuffing his face. Kanda would be the only one quietly eating during these tense breakfasts that became less and less infrequent.

---

Lavi had taken up smoking. He'd almost hacked up a lung the first time he'd tried it, even though he had been expecting it. It was common sense that inhaling smoke and ash into your body was a bad idea, and Lavi had his own theories on how it must impact breathing over time. But he just needed something to do. He was getting restless.

There was still plenty to record. Plenty. The Order kept him busy with its day to day disasters, and the miraculous ark was still getting him shipped to all corners of the Earth. Missions came and went. Sometimes with the younger exorcists, who bored him with their dog-pack antics, tripping all over their feet and barking at each other unintelligibly. Sometimes with Krory, who liked to talk about the old days, back when he had been with Miranda before she died. (Nothing related to the war, although she had been on a mission. The traffic in the big cities were getting worse and worse.) Sometimes with Allen, or Lenalee, which would be fun. Sometimes with the two of them together, which could be a real chore. Sometimes with Kanda, which always went fine as long as Lavi minded his own business, and why wouldn't he?

But whenever he was home, he got the disquieting sense that there was nothing to do. Things had become such routine that he was often driven to get out of it. When he tried to settle down to his work, sometimes he had to get up again and pace aimlessly through all the halls and turrets. He would take some papers with him, so things got done, but he would always end up staring at something eventually. The sky out the window, a tapestry he's already committed to memory down to the last thread, the rainbow heads of the young ones squabbling out in the yard. Once in a while he ran into Lenalee doing the same thing, but she would always give him a warm little half smile and say something about nesting instincts.

Sarcastically, of course, and Lavi would smile back at her, but even though he liked her she honestly depressed him a little. He was, no way to avoid it, discontent. He wasn't sure what it was. It would have been grim indeed if they were both hitting their midlife crises already. Lenalee, he knew though, was just living the complexities of her relationship with Allen, which was grey business enough. But Lavi, he felt like he was a journal being kept shelved somewhere while an invisible presence still wrote in the closed pages.

It didn't make sense. He was recording the most important war taking place at the moment. He wasn't bored of it. Wars were fluid enough without helpfully stimulating wildcards like fantastical monsters and holy relics thrown. He knew he 'd been doing it for a long time, but…What had Bookman said? "I wanted you to find out about this by yourself through writing many records, but this war has gone on for most of your life. When it finally ends, every form of you that existed during it must vanish. But remember that when you close a record, you mustn't be afraid. It is only like going to sleep, and you will wake again."

Lavi's energy had been sleepy in general lately. This worried him, because the war, as far as he could tell, was far from done. He felt discouraged, and despite what Bookman had said, scared. His life was this war, and the war was his life--when "he" died, his body would only be the words he wrote for this war. He didn't have the right to kill the record just because his mind was weakening.

Wandering kept him alert. If he didn't do it, he would sometimes sit at his desk, breathing, just breathing, blink and find that hours had gone by. But if he stalked the halls of the Order, the history would seem to yank at him imploringly with fingers grown out of the walls.

So he started smoking to plant that need to get up and out. The Order had new rules about stinking up the place, since their latest HQ was castle was technically on loan from one of the local lords.

Bookman didn't quite approve because he saw it as a crutch. He smoked a pipe, but there was hardly such a deep rationale behind it. Lavi argued him down about how all the great masters had had their quirky aids. Like Bookman's panda spots. But then, Lavi thought as he lost another centimeter on his cigarette with an inhale, this wasn't so much quirky as…sullen.

"Junior." Bookman's age-ravaged voice creaked at him from down the hall. Lavi lifted a hand to show that he heard him, and would be over as soon as he was done. Bookman was old now--no, ancient, even if his mind was a clear as glass and tongue sharp as a new shard. Lavi wanted to spare him any unnecessary movement.

"Lavi. The Kanda boy. He's brought in someone you need to meet."

Lavi ground the stub underneath his boot, biting his tongue. Somewhere in his brain where things used to be funnier, he had a vision of Kanda holding hands with a similarly gorgeous young man, the two of them flashing big smiles and engagement rings before the rest gang. For some reason, the image just made him feel dour. Yeah. Maybe even Kanda would find a steady boyfriend when this was all over, and they would go to Japan and set up a dojo and rut underneath the cherry trees. Kanda's always had direction and decisiveness, so once he decided to be happy he'd get the job done. Not like Lavi, the slacker. Pft.

"Lavi…"Bookman seemed nervous, swaying slightly like there was no time for Lavi to wrap up his thoughts. This concerned Lavi. Bookman had always been a stalwart pillar of stiff posture, no matter what the circumstances.

"What's going on, Bookman?"

Bookman's head twisted and his shriveled mouth, sunken in now, moved convulsively over his gums. He raised his arms.

"…Gramps?"

"You are going to have to sneak in." Bookman's eyes had lost much of their color. They were milky and damaged now, yellow where the whites should be and spidery veins clumping. He didn't like looking his apprentice in eye the anymore because of this, because being a Bookman was about sight. The eyes, when clear, can be peered through like a water pass to see the contents beneath. It was hard for him to lose this.

Lavi hadn't seem them directly for years now, but now they steadily held his, the phlegm-y, expired things unflinching. "You must not be afraid." Bookman said, slipping a piece of paper between his claws into Lavi's outstretched hand.

Tyki Mikk was waiting for him. Much about him was the same. The wide, lascivious mouth. The feathery dark hair. He was dressed only in bandages from the waist up and had the languid movements of a heavily injured man, but Lavi instantly read from the muscles of his face that the pain was meaningless to him.

Their last encounter, Tyki Mikk had primed his mind to break by telling him a fairytale about Allen Walker's death. Then his sister had finished the job by cutting his heart from the inside out. Bookmen knew to read the eyes. Tyki Mikk's were a beautiful black nothingness, pits that lacked even for walls in their perfection. Nevertheless, Lavi told himself not to be afraid.

Two days later and the Order was on high alert after Tyki Mikk escaped from his cell. When he disappeared without further incident, no one slept for a long, long time because they were sure he had left some kind of a time bomb catastrophe within their walls. Everything from missions to vacations went on freeze in anticipation of a Noah trick. It took a month for everyone to calm down enough to get back to business, albeit with an underlying wariness that emergency would come again.

Meanwhile Lavi gave intense answers to Allen's under the table hypothetical questions about how he would feel about best-manhood. He went on missions. He helped out after Lenalee kicked a hole in the wall in frustration, and then took her on a shopping trip a few months later to pick out a Christmas present for Allen. Kanda quietly acquiesced to a joint birthday party on the roof, which was nothing but the two of them drinking gin until Lavi passed out. Lavi went on several information-seeking expeditions on the arc, furiously stacking high the bundles of research until he needed a new room just for storage. Bookman retired with some withering remarks about wanting to die in peace and quiet. Lavi gave Kanda a hair cut because it got ridiculously long to the point that people couldn't sit next to him or risk sitting on it. He set Krory up with the shop-girl he always bought his inks from on St. Valentine's Day. He organized an autumn football tournament for the new exorcists and made Chaoji the referee. And he quit smoking.

He left letters for Krory, Komui, Allen, Lenalee, and Chaoji.

The were all the same. Some form of

"Dear X, I deeply regret having to leave so suddenly, I have come to an impasse in my life and will miss you dearly… I will keep fighting in my own way… I know you are strong and will win…I will see you at the end, but I hope to write to you in the meantime..." etc, etc. And then, always the kind-hearted afterthought,

"I love you."

Except for Kanda's, which didn't say anything of the sort. Lavi ended his letter differently.

"Be careful."

---

MUST-STOP-COMING-UP-WITH-FIC-IDEAS-MUST-STUDY-MUST-STOP-EATING-CHOCOLATE-COVERED-COFFEE-BEANS.

Switching to past tense is hard. Pardon the mistakes for now, please, I was in a rush and I haven't written in past tense for…a very long time. But please point them out to me so I can fix them.

Welcome to the last big push before winter break is over. I was looking over my KandaLavi fics when I realized…they're never a happy couple in any of them. Either they don't get together, or get together and break up, or so something really sick and twisted to each other by the end. (Murder, date-rape…ugh, is anyone surprised to hear that I'm a happy person in real life?)

So this is my attempt to write a real love story. (No, really this time.) It takes a lot from what I've learned from life recently. It's always uncertain, and sometimes you're not sure of what matters and what doesn't. It can be agonizingly slow. I'm not deliberately doing role reversal with their sexualities. Coming into adulthood is never a predictable process, and here Kanda and Lavi arrived at it differently.

It's going be broken up into three parts. The chapter titles are lines from the song "Home" by Intercept, if you want to look it up.

This first part was marathon of six hours straight of writing and getting very jittery hands while writing the chicken scene. Lavi's state was clearly my own.

It might take a while to get this done. Just saying.


	2. And I'll pray for you

It's the last thing I wanted to say.

Part Two: And I'll pray for you but I don't know why…

Kanda had been raised spoiled, Lavi found out. His mother must have been the one who taught him there was something unique to having two tails of one's sleek, long hair lying on the breastbone. It was the fashion of older Japanese women to wear it up, but she let it flow in watery waves all the way down to a small waist padded by an extravagant obi.

She looked like a goddess in a painting, gliding freely to mold the Earth at her fingertips. At his too-new Japanese her hand came up white in its rich sleeve of chrysanthemums, to give grace to her sniffing laughter. As for his father, he had the same flinty shortness in his speech as his son. His looks impacted Lavi less than the maddening detail of how he always wore his two heavy swords at his side, even at meal times.

They hadn't liked the dusty, off-color wanderer calling from their fancy gates. Kanda's mother had bowed in unenthused deference when she received him. He could see in her remarkably well-preserved eyes that she was already counting the pleasantries required to be rid of him in her head. She'd only narrowed her lips and nodded to a servant when he held out the letter for her. When the servant had read aloud her son's name, she had given a small cry and sank low over and over again in front of him in thanks.

Kanda's words were stiff and only about how he was honoring his parents from a distance and would not shame them. It moved the elderly couple to genteel euphoria, culminating in an extended invitation to stay. But once the favor was dealt, Lavi could tell that it was quickly regretted, no matter how many dinners' worth of describing Yuu's sword technique he had in him. The Kandas were not so happy to host a foreigner. Worse, a foreigner who would be foreign to a foreigner, with a slightly Asiatic warmth to his Western paleness. Mixed blood, they could sense, and that did not sit well with them. Normally he would have at least thought this over a little, but he owed the Kandas some gracious unthinking forgiveness. The letter was fake, after all.

"So, Lavi-san." Lavi had dropped from a prodigal-son-in-the-form-of-news-sama to a -san in a matter of hours. While that usually translated to improvement--more familiarity--he knew here the implication was different altogether. "Does my son speak often of finding a wife?" Kanda's mother was pale like moonlight and a good deal too beautiful for her age. She was also a master of demure tones and innocent inquiry, throwing confounding moving silk sheets over piercingly sharp thoughts. Lavi rather liked her.

"Yuu-san said that he could never marry without the express permission of his mother and father, who are the only ones wise enough to choose a proper bride. And besides, he would never consort with a Western woman." he answered, being good. He gave a winning smile, one of adulation for the man in question. He took a small sip of his sake as if in Yuu's honor.

Kanda's mother made an approving sound in her throat while his father nodded in noble satisfaction. But oh, they were just like Kanda. Sharpness was slipping from the corners of their eyes without them moving their heads. They were like the matched swords that Kanda used when he was at his most fearsome. Working in unison and from the same origin. Kanda was not a little boy any more. His parents were too smart to actually believe he was behaving like one. But he was telling his colleagues the right things. Giving the right impression about not being blatantly disgraceful in some distant land.

"Well, Lavi-san. My wife and I must retire for the night." Kanda's old, still muscle-taut and dangerous samurai of a father rose from the table, dipping his head. Lavi returned it. God, his neck was going to be sore by the time he got out of this country. "Feel free to roam the premises. We can not thank you enough for looking after our troublesome son all these years, and letting us know he is well."

"No trouble." Lavi protested jauntily, waving them off. He couldn't resist. "Yuu-chan mentioned he had a sister, though. Might I meet her?"

Lavi allowed them successive waves of consternation--at the inappropriateness of asking to meet with a woman of the house, of the embarrassingly childish nickname for their oldest son, and as it turned out to be the real issue, addressing the existence of their daughter at all.

Kanda's father was brief and unwelcoming. "We do not speak of our daughter." he said curtly. And like the split piece rushing to find its whole, Kanda's mother provided the recovery. "Yes, foreigner-san" she chided him, deviously kind like a kindergarten teacher with her naïve charges. "You may not know this, but in this country it is inappropriate to mention a girl that has already left the household. It is a great sorrow, but our daughter left our family shortly after our son departed for your army."

"Ah." Lavi simpered.

He spent the next week carefully looking over the complex--committing to memory its sliding light-as-air paper and wood doors, the artfully arranged rock garden, the meticulously cared-for family shrine. Then he charmed the address of Kanda's sister out of one of the servants and left.

---

Kanda and Lenalee were given a mission together. While Lenalee busied herself chasing a false lead across town, Kanda wasted no time lopping off the head of the statue with healing powers and confiscating its sparkling eyeball. He got the pedestrians at the scene to agree that it was a shame that those winged servants of Lucifer (which he had similarly decapitated) had destroyed such a miracle, and thank you for saving them all. Kanda wrapped up the day by spending the night in the red light district.

He sighed to himself, ill-tempered as his partner rubbed his perfumed hair on his stomach like an overconfident cat. He'd never resorted to using a place of business before. He found them unpleasant. Jewel-shaded men and women, languishing in the decorated doorframes, calling out sleepy-eyed to the shoppers sliding past, "Spend some time with us, handsome, pretty lady, blue-eyed stranger."

They sprinkled this sweetness on everyone. It didn't matter if it was a fresh-faced nervous teenager, a strutting middle-aged wealthy businessman with a bulge over his expensive belt, or a haughty old woman with her nose in the air like she was there to deliver a sermon instead of taking her pleasure. When they had caught sight of Kanda, their drowsing faces lit up briefly, like a herd of lazy cats in the dark seeing a rare canary walk into their nest. But they had oozed the same tepid honey, trilling "Come in, come in, angel."

That was why Kanda usually couldn't stand whores. People had spoon-fed him compliments all his life, ever since Japan--beautiful, heavenly, lovely oh so lovely. They had filled him with so much that he started spitting it all back out. It had been nothing but cheap gifts, meaningless clutter. He threw it away like garbage, it was so tacky and offensive.

But he remembered that when he was young--in a way that he was beginning to not be so young--he began noticing things. Sly things. The slightest flicker of a man's eyes and his condescending smile in a tea shop. A laughing remark from another boy in a shop about how he stared too hard at something he thought he couldn't have. It had perplexed him and thrown him into strange moments of irritation mixed with anticipation. He hadn't understood it for a time. But he had learned. No child stayed a child forever.

And it was in this way that Kanda learned that things could be said without being said, in gestures and hints. This was a secret art that the world ran itself around, unnoticing. It's practitioners were both smug and delicate. They spent time in both and had to be careful to hold them apart like they were keeping a paper separated from a flame. Kanda had no illusions that his looks made it easier for him to find others and for others to find him, so the natural frequency of when it happened had been enough. Unlike the blunt transactions between the kind of people in brothels, and their obvious noise, the there was skill and trickiness involved, including whether Kanda could escape the notice of his mission partner. It was easier for Kanda to live with this than be regular patron to these disgusting places.

But then he had gotten into a bad habit when Lavi--the idiot--had walked into his world by accident in Spain. He and Lavi were often paired together for missions back when Lavi had been with the Order. It was because Lavi never seemed to be bothered by anything. Pity the more easily wounded hearts of Krory and Chaoji, or the blood pressure of Allen, or the excitably whiny or unctuous rookies, to be paired for a mission with Kanda. Komui was nice to his soldiers. He gave Kanda to Lavi to handle and spared the rest when he could. And he had been right to, because Lavi really hadn't cared. He had stared for a moment, then looked away. It had been characteristic of his roving interest as a Bookman.

For all the times after that he'd been with Kanda, Lavi had been far too permissible. Lavi would see it happening--Bookmen were too good at knowing when people had secrets--then he would deliberately wander away to do something else. Something relevant to him. To be able to not care about another person's presence, and so frequently, had given Kanda too many opportunities. He got too used to it. At first, he had resented Lavi's knowing. But Lavi's apathy never wavered. His knowing even made things easier on Kanda, and Kanda had to acknowledge the blessing of it. After Lavi's departure it became difficult to constrain himself to the far more conservative schedule he had used before.

Kanda was cross as he pushed his sweaty bangs out of his face as his companion for the night started licking at his free hand. He had picked this one because out of the lineup whispering excitedly, looking him over with mischievous anticipation while passing each other whispers behind hands, this one had eyes had swept over Kanda with more envy than silly awe.

But he'd turned out be tedious flatterer of Kanada's hair, skin, and sword. And he was a giggler to boot. Kanda bit back the wrong kind of groan when the other person clambered on top on top of him, still babbling breathlessly about how _exotic_ he was instead of just shutting up and getting to work. Komui had insisted this would be a demanding job, so he had put ever-patient Lenalee on task with him. Kanda saw her in a more positive light than otherwise, despite her being the loving sort. Unfortunately, her sensitivity to people gave her sharp insight. Kanda hadn't even tried for a casual encounter approach with her around, and they were both due back at the Order tomorrow. God, he missed Lavi sometimes.

With his poor pick mewling at him, he got started.

---

Kanda's sister had breasts that smelled like orchids.

She didn't look like him, surprisingly, considering how lovely she was. She was a different type of beauty altogether, bound to the Earth, whereas Kanda seemed as if he could float to the clouds and judge the imperfect Earth at any moment he wished. Like his ethereally conniving mother.

Kanda's sister was more reminiscent of their father. Her handsome face distracted from a panther-ish way of moving. She had a self-possessed fluidity and was ready to slip across the space between you and her at any moment before you could say a word. Of course, Kanda's father had done no such thing because Lavi was not someone to cut down. Kanda's sister was more ambivalent about that.

She caught his cheek with the back of her hand, a single brushing stroke.

"So you've come to tell me about my big brother, eh?" she laughed softly at him. Her hair was much shorter than any high-born girl should dare. It was cut straight across the bottoms around her ears. Black and glossy, it was the only physical trait she seemed to share with her brother.

"If you want to hear about him." Lavi answered agreeably. They were crossing a small wooden bridge spanning one of those manmade ponds. It was thick with blooming water plants in femininely pale colors, fish with rare patterns nibbling at the roots.

She continued laughing, not like her mother screening the sound with her white robes, but uncovered hands clasping Lavi's.

"I don't. I think you want to hear about him. And I would rather hear about you." Lavi grinned at her. Who knew someone this smart could be a blood relative of Kanda's? She titled her pointed chin at him, kittenishly scheming. "Let me think." she requested mockingly. "You claim to be his friend, but do not bring him with you. You have no purposeful business here, but want to meet our parents. Now, what could you be to my brother, Lavi-san?"

"A victim?" Lavi suggested innocously, which made her chortle in an unrefined manner.

"Perhaps. Did he frighten you into being his lover? He must have conned you into coming here to get some subliminal form of approval from our parents in a twisted attempt to maintain his honor. That's just the kind of demented way Yuu-nii likes to think." She glittered at him through her teasing, already aware of his inclinations by the way he was admiring her cleavage amid the flashy red of her wisteria-printed kimono. So she added in false thoughtfulness, "I completely understand if you made an exception in your preferences for Yuu-nii. He made for quite the beautiful girl when he was a child. Is he your beautiful woman now? Or is he fighting what nature intended and making you his woman instead?"

Lavi gave her a lopsided smile at the absurdity. "No." He said simply to all of it. His fingers crept around the cloth she was lazily allowing to slip off her smooth shoulders, and he started to play with her white neck, tickling. She didn't squirm. "Did he tell you about himself before he left? I would have thought he was too young."

"Sisters are wiser than parents." she explained deftly with a shrug. This caused her sleeves to drop down further. "I could tell he was faye back when he had nothing in his head and hand except a sword. Not that I said anything."

"You didn't like Yuu very much, did you?" Lavi observed candidly. His younger sister shrugged again, releasing Lavi's hand to idly flick crimson maple leaves at the swimming koi below.

"I didn't miss him." she smiled. "None of us did, except those foolish enough to be in love with him. Yuu-nii was a bully."

"Hm." Lavi mused. Kanda's sister placidly continued, "When they came to take my brother away, he didn't fight, even though he had such a good life here. They told our father that Yuu would be someone who fought against evil itself, like one of the gods. So they wanted him to go. They said he could return when he won. And he listened, just like that. I always thought after all these years that his side must have lost, and that he committed seppuku."

"No, it's just taking a long time." Lavi reassured her. "So what happened with you and your parents?"

"They kicked me out because I wouldn't marry the man they chose for me. Maybe they would have done it anyways, but, you know…." she trailed off, crafting her next words carefully. "…I played a little joke on them before I left, that's all. They had it enshrined in room like it was the sacred mirror. Like it was supposed to be him sitting there. I'm surprised he didn't take it when he went, but they said he didn't need it. I thought they deserved it, parents who gave away one good son and then could think about anything else but using their daughter to get another one."

"…you decided you'd rather just know a good man."

Kanda's sister seemed perpetually amused with the world. Her tinkling laughter rang over the water.

"Oh, as many as possible." she returned, wrapping her half-bare arms around his neck. "Are you a good man, Lavi-san?"

"No, I'm a terrible one." he said truthfully, pressing his face into her sweet-smelling hair.

"Good." she murmured approvingly. She took his hand started to lead him into the modest cottage she lived in.

"I'd be using you, you know." he warned her, just in case, although his hand was already on the knots securing her sash as they walked.

"That's fine. I could tell that you were the type right away. I'm using you too, friend of my brother and foreigner-sama." she pushed this thought away brightly. She slid easily out of her sandals and draped herself on his back as he sat on the stoop, unlacing his boots.

"Are you living like this to get back at your brother and your parents?" Lavi went on conversationally as he tugged the strings loose.

"Oh yes." she conceded instantly. "But I expect that you'll make it quite fun. I only regret getting you in trouble with Yuu-nii." He followed her into the dark unlit hall of her house. "He's a terrible hypocrite, you know. He'll say something about how you defiled his dear sister, even though I can tell you now that he never even pretended to notice me. He only said he had a sister, and didn't even mention my name, didn't he?"

"Something like that." Lavi admitted as they began to undress each other in her room. The futon was already neatly unfurled on the swept floor.

"Does it bother you that he won't be grateful?" she whispered to him as she laid back. "Nii-san never knew how to give thanks. Only how to hold a grudge."

"It doesn't matter." Lavi said, leaning into her mouth.

---

Lavi did write to them. He wrote and wrote and wrote about the things he'd seen. He cited specifically the things they would have liked best--for Krory, the technology expo Germany. For Chaoji, a master and crew just like Anita's. He enclosed little gifts the in the packets, like rare pressed flowers for Lenalee and lumps of local sweets for Allen. He was always on the move, doing "work" he said. But sometimes he'd give them a place to write to ahead of his itinerary, so they would be able to answer.

His first round, left in a tied bundle in in his abandoned room, had made them force Kanda to sit with them to compare notes for a day and cry. He'd read his, not completely unfeeling. They had spent a lot of time together. Lavi had known about him, and not judged him. Although admittedly, if he had, Kanda would have retaliated by letting his own sexual situation be known. Lavi had had something of a reputation among the Order, the kind that induced blushes and winks between the girl exorcists and laundry maids. He'd encouraged it, flirting shamelessly, so there must have been a reason.

He knew Lavi had been lying, of course. The line about monks had been incredibly lame. Lavi wasn't shy, and even if Kanda didn't already know that most people found Lavi funny and smart, he himself was living proof that a deficiency in charisma didn't stop you from finding someone to sleep with you. There was no reason for a reasonably attractive twenty-something man to be a virgin. And any time Lavi did something odd it could always be traced back to his shady other job. He was predictable under pressure. Maybe he didn't care. He was sometimes like that, uncaring that you caught him a lie because you knowing was that insignificant to the grand scheme of things. Kanda hadn't been enchanted with that part of him.

Kanda remembers that Lavi's last birthday before he had left had been with him, drinking himself into oblivion. He would have said no, but Lavi had looked him straight in the eye and growled in uncommon insistence "I let you be a bitch most times of the year, but today's my birthday and you owe me for a lot. Besides, I've got enough liquor to put down a horse, but it'll only make two grown men sick and stupid." Then Lavi had added, taking care not to sound too kind, "And anyways, your birthday passed while you were on a mission. I know you try to avoid Lenalee's cake and card ceremonies even when she has the chance to spring them on you, so give me some credit. You'd prefer drinking with a guy buddy, right?"

Point taken, so Kanda and Lavi had ended up on the roof taking turns with shots. Starting off, Lavi had fielded a one-sided conversation about the constellations and what the ancient Greeks could have predicted from them about this war. It whole thing had Kanda feeling faintly immature. It was a better activity for delinquent teens than adult men. But Lavi acted like a delinquent teen on his best days, so it hadn't been that awkward. A lot of lapses in talking had been filled easily enough by pouring another drink.

He had more than Kanda, who didn't hate gin, but preferred sake and vodka. Kanda had still been halfway lucid when Lavi hit his limit and threw up over the edge of the roof. Kanda had smirked at his red head bobbing over the side. Lavi had come up with tears in his eyes.

"Nnngghhh…Yuu, f-feel like shit…" he'd moaned. Holding his hair back with a hand, he'd stuck his head back over.

The man was one hell of a drunk. Effected himself, even Kanda had some degree of pity for the vomiting, crying mess. He'd crossed over, vision a little blurry, and sat next Lavi while he retched, crouching on his hands and knees over the protective edging.

"S-sorry." He'd said in between heaving breaths. "M'sorry, Yuu."

"For what?" Kanda asked, disoriented from drink. "Being sick? You had most of a bottle of straight gin."

"No…I…Ugh!" Another wave. Lavi had began to sob quietly with his forehead pressed to the tile. "I don't know…I'm just sorry. For…everything. I'm sorry, Yuu…so sorry…"

Kanda thought he'd been referring to last year in Spain. Lavi had told him afterwards about the gap in his sleep pattern, and the rooster, and the coffee. He'd only ignored him at the time. The alcohol and Lavi turning out to be a sad drunk made it all seem a lot funnier, so he'd laughed. And he had said:

"It's fine, Lavi."

Lavi had grunted faintly "S' not…" before passing out. Kanda had helped him get to bed, and the next morning at breakfast had seen him almost dipping his bangs into an oversized mug of coffee. Allen and Lenalee, for once not in one of their atmospherically dampening tiffs, were united in their bleak wordless masks of "What the fuck happened?" on the other side of the table. Kanda didn't volunteer any answers because he busy shoving past the breakfast line to get some coffee for his own hangover.

Maybe Lavi had been thinking about his decision already that day. Maybe he was sorry that he managed to stumble into the biggest secret of Kanda's life before he had run off. And maybe Lavi had made him feel strangely normal, the way he'd been sort-of talking about the way he was like it was just something to talk about--sitting around with another person, drinking himself witless, watching said person puke from it.

Still, Kanda sat stubbornly as far back as he could in his seat and let Lenalee have her few hours full of tears. Allen reviewed his old mopey clown faces with his arm around her, Chaoji hiccoughed with moist eyes and Krory thoughtfully watched the fire. He was due to marry the girl Lavi had found for him in a few months. They were all wounded and talkative and nit-picking at every generic word he'd left for them, sifting for clues to his state of mind--what prompted his decision, if it had been painful for him.

He didn't want people looking too closely at his. It was tactful, the way Lavi had left out the "love" part for his letter, and not too dumb because who in their right mind would use that word with him? But to Kanda's pride, it looked too obvious.

But Lavi never did play games with him. No little presents in his letters. Lavi would always be agreeably concise, as if he could predict what would happen if he got too sentimental (I.e. borderline affectionate). Not only would Kanda not write back, his standing policy, but he would start burning them as they arrived. Lenalee made disproving faces at him whenever she had a pen and a paper in her own hand, but Kanda let her and Allen and the rest give Lavi short updates of "Kanda's healthy, Kanda's wounded, Kanda's recovered, he's grumpy, he was amazing on that last mission." None of it was was inaccurate, anyways.

"Dear Yuu," Lavi would say without expectation of a response.

"I hope you're being nice to the newer exorcists."

"Don't be so hard on Allen. Everyone says he's catching up to you."

"I went to that town again; you know, the one for our fourth or fifth mission. The girls there are still just as pretty."

"Do your best to win this war for me." He wrote once.

---

One of the things Lavi quickly found out was that Tyki Mikk didn't know how to keep his hands to himself.

"I told you not to do that." he told off the Noah mildly. Tyki would have been delighted if he became passionately upset over something like two male hands on his waist. The first time it had happened Lavi had cursed him out. This turned out to be the trigger for a game of Tyki's that consisted of feeling up your organs until you screamed. Lavi had not taken to it well.

Lavi wasn't as skittish about that anymore, though. All the Noah had strange, fetishistic ways of entertaining themselves. It was symptomatic of the immortals. It had gotten to the point that discouraging them felt like spraying water at cats to stop them from clawing the furniture. They only did it out of sheer boredom.

"Why?" Tyki asked coquettishly, not letting go.

"Tyki, I don't like you."

"I like you." He countered. Lavi rolled his eyes. Centuries too long in semi-human form and the Noah seemed to regress further and further into childlike behavior. Rhode was the poster child.

"I'm working." He tried another angle. This usually was enough to fend the dusty-skinned pack off, if he was stubborn enough of it. He leaned back over the desk, determinedly writing another two lines. Tyki ignored this first attempt and pressed into his back, resting his chin on Lavi's shoulder and talking into his ear.

"Why don't you like me, Lavi?"

"You tried to kill me. You tried to kill Allen." Lavi filled in automatically. His handwriting was getting sloppy, he noticed. He'd have to check that.

"Only once! And that was a long time ago." Tyki playfully blew on his neck, enticing. "I promise not to do it again." he whispered.

Lavi grabbed onto his hand and with a tricky, well-practiced sleight of foot, looped him and got out of his hold. "Not gonna work. You already promised." he reminded Tyki, whose abyss-eyes were taking him in with undeterred amusement.

"But you've yet to make it worth my while. You're such a tease, Bookman."

Lavi wearily turned away this accusation with a shake of his head. "Tyki, that's just not true and you know it. I'm doing what I'm supposed to. You've seen me."

Tyki laughed, reaching out and flicking overgrown bangs out of Lavi's reproachful eyes.

"And what exactly are you supposed to be doing? Strange women all over the world?"

Lavi shrugged. "It's not like I'm not allowed to anymore. You never said I couldn't do things the way I wanted, as long as it got done."

"So quick to throw away your purity and principles." Tyki chided him suggestively. He put an uninvited hand on Lavi's hip.

"Just took up a different set, that's all." Lavi told him calmly, not taking his eyes off Tyki's smirking face. "And it's not like you didn't already know this, since you've obviously been tracking my sex life, but I told you I wasn't interested in men."

"Yet." Tyki added onto his sentence for him. "Give it a few decades. Women alone get boring."

Lavi picked up the hand on him like it was a dead frog, dropping it as quickly as possible. It was slow work, understanding the Noah. For most of them, the way they spoke was a nebulous blend of jester's riddles, sage's advice, and philosopher's revelations. All of it was delivered in spouts of hyper riots or liquid-heavy ennui. Or, in Tyki's case, seductive coaxing, winning you over into absorbing his words like cult propaganda. As Lavi watched, Tyki took his hand back, amused, as if he'd just withdrawn an adult pleasure from a child; Lavi was revolted now but would beg for it later once he grew up.

Lavi reflected how incredibly difficult it was to get out of his too-human impression that all Noah were ill-spent wisdom.

"You should sleep with me in the future. You would learn a lot." Tyki commented casually in a way that a normal man would use when inviting a friend out for drinks.

Lavi swore in one of his fifteen languages. Not in shock, but exasperation.

"I was one of 'those' in one of my past lives, you know. One of those people Bookmen were allowed to consort with. I was born noble. The more eccentric nobles have always liked pursuing those kinds of things." Tyki grinned impishly at him, borrowing a mask from his little-girl-older-sister. "It would make you a better Bookman. You do go on about that."

"I'm sure." Lavi snapped, finally riled, and a little upset with this information. In what way? If anyone would be uncritical about living Biblical anomalies insinuating their way into mortal, carnal fold, it would be the Bookmen. "But I still wouldn't sleep with you."

"No?" Tyki asked, unconcerned. "It seems I caught you at a bad time, setting up house. Not in the mood. I understand."

"I don't find you attractive." Lavi insisted. _Monster,_ he thought halfheartedly, because it would be counterproductive--and wrong--to say it out loud. It was already wrong to think it. It was hard getting used to the new way of things, but he had to. He was already on his way, and it wasn't that bad. No turning back now.

"Give it a few decades." Tyki said again, laughing, grooming his black silk locks with perfect fingers.

Pleasure really was one of the more aggravating components of Noah's psyche.

---

Lavi faithfully continued to send letters to them and they faithfully continued to pounce upon them and tear them apart. Little changed about them. They followed the same format of "I was just here, I just saw this. How are you all?" They had more interesting news to send back, most of the time. Or, at least, they tried too. It was if they didn't want to disappoint him by being stagnant. Or maybe they were trying to bribe him home with all the excitement that had sprung up immediately following his departure. Lenalee in particular always slipped in a gentle rebuke for missing all the fun in her postscript. Lavi never gave her any more hope than a "that's too bad" each time.

They were preparing themselves for the biggest guilt trip yet with the wedding.

"I thought we had a no marriage, no family rule." Kanda grumbled as he got ready. He had been enlisted to be part of the wedding party. Komui had threatened to suspend him for two months if he acted up.

"That was easier when we were all kids or came married." Allen said matter-of-factly. All of them were in the men's dressing room--him, Allen, and Chaoji. "That old rule was just to stop people from calling back their loved ones when no one was watching. If either spouse croaks, the surviving spouse agrees to have the body cremated immediately and to be monitored during the grieving period to prevent contact with the Earl. Komui worked it out with the Vatican." And then, catching sight of Kanda's prayer beads, Allen scolded him for mismatching the rest of the party. Kanda scowled, but left his bracelet on the table.

The bride was voluminous and blushing in her many layers of lace. Her hometown was one of those quaint countryside hamlets, the kind that made the pale groom look as if he were a spook descending upon the simple folk. But his soon-to-be-wife didn't seem to mind. Her voice was light and teasing as she excitedly clutched her bridesmaid's hands in anticipation. Lenalee had worn her hair loose for the occasion to match everyone else. Throughout the ceremony her straight dark hair stood out starkly from the cream-colored materials of the dresses and the pale curly heads of the other women.

Later that night at the rented out inn, well bedecked with congratulatory banners and flowers and feast foods, Kanda found her on a balcony overlooking the central courtyard. Below, the wedding dances were in full swing. The candles and torches cast a rosy glow even on Krory's bloodless cheeks as he and his wife stepped merrily across the floor, hands twined. Other dancing couples opened up to a circle around them so they could clap and cheer for them to the traditional wedding song. Lenalee shone soft eyes on them.

"Lenalee, Walker's looking for you." Kanda told her shortly, expecting to snap her out of her dreamy reverie. Women. So sentimental.

Lenalee turned to him and he saw that her eyes were a little glassy.

"He is, is he?" She sounded strange. Kanda noticed redness across the bridge of her nose.

"Lenalee, are you drunk?"

"Oh." Lenalee shifted, and in the dim light Kanda could make out her squinting at her hand. She was grasping the thin stem of a half-full glass that he hadn't seen before. "I don't know, actually. Maybe I am. I don't usually drink."

"Well, Allen's looking for you." Kanda repeated, figuring Lenalee's man could scoop her up and move her into their room if she wasn't feeling well enough to see the festivities through. She was one of the important guests, but Krory and his wife seemed perfectly happy to pay attention only to each other.

"I'm getting married, Kanda." Lenalee answered. She extended her hand out over the railing, over the lit heads of the wedding revelers below. Kanda could see the jewel winking weakly in the darkness.

"Congratulations." he said without hesitation. "Why isn't he with you, then?"

"Oh, you know. It's their night. Didn't want to steal the spotlight…"

"Hm." Kanda affirmed. Then, quietly and without malice, "Why did you say yes?"

Lenalee stared at him blankly. "What was I supposed to say? I love him." she replied.

Allen retrieved her a few minutes later because someone at the buffet table had seen her admiring the scene from up above. They all went back to the main party and after it ended a few hours later, they retired to their rooms. The bride's background demanded that the weddings be a rich affair, and Krory was still officially a Count with a fortune piled up in gold coins somewhere in his home country. He used it to lavish a two-day stay upon his friends and his wife's relatives, with activities like hunts and drives.

Kanda avoided most of it by doing solitary training in the woodlands. That was where he was when the inn was razed to the ground by the flock of akuma that breezed in. Some hysterically excited younger exorcists even later reported sightings of a long-haired beautiful woman in a suit, her exposed hands and face as gray as stone.

Allen and Krory took it upon themselves to dig guests out from the rubble before the inn was reduced completely to cinders. Kanda wanted to get to work exterminating the problem, but Lenalee recruited him to accompany her to town to lift collapsed building rubble off the trapped townspeople she'd spotted by circling the air. It was, as she snapped out with vicious anger when he had balked, because she wasn't strong enough to do it herself. Chaoji had run off to search for Komui.

Krory's weeping wife was gingerly packed into one of the emergency coaches sent by the Order to get everyone out. She had a bad burn stretching from her ankle to her knee. Krory held her hand up until the last few moments when they separated, her screaming his name and clawing. He had to stay to help purge the area of akuma. Allen had turned sad eyes on her blistered skin and muttered that it was a shame that Miranda wasn't there. At the bride's stricken expression, Lenalee had punched him in the arm. Really punched him, so that even when they all started home after a long, exhausting two nights of fires and fights, covered in ashes and dust, Allen still bore a sickly purple bruise.

It wasn't until they were climbing into the carriages that Kanda remembered the prayer bracelet he had let behind. It was defunct as a religious object, he'd stopped praying or calling himself Buddhist a few years after he left Japan. But his mother had slid it onto his wrist the day he left. He'd started to push his way back out, but this was met with a large wave of protest from his tired comrades. They wanted to go home, Krory needed to see his wife as soon as possible, the inn was burned to nothing and the beads had been made out of wood. Kanda had given in, but not before delivering a cutting comment about going into a firestorm for a lost hairclip. Lenalee punched him too.

So when they wrote to Lavi, they had little to make him envy what he had missed. Each reported one item of tragedy. Krory's wife would have a permanent scar. The status of one of the youngest exorcists, and his innocence, was unknown; he had been reported by his team to have been last seen running after Lulubell, with his golem going offline shortly after. The town had been completely destroyed and the Vatican had issued a strict ban on large Order gatherings. It was too much of a temptation for the other side. This was not appreciated by Allen, who started grousing about a large wedding even though Lenalee's irritated sighs became more and more pronounced beside him. Even Kanda appeared to have suffered, Allen noted sarcastically in his version of events. Nothing more unfortunate happened than him losing his bracelet. This was certainly evidenced by Kanda's bad mood over it--a most rare state for him.

A series of letters from Lavi arrived after, awash in sympathy and angry exclamation for all the damage inflicted. He sent some special poultices that would help with the burn, he said, and some luxuriantly rich jewelry and cigars for the new couple. He was sorry that the circumstances couldn't be happier for such a wonderful occasion.

A packet came for Kanda, which opened up the exactly right bracelet from the right temple, a string of alternating black and white wood prayer beads so new they reflected light.

"Thank you." his return note had said awkwardly.

---

Lavi thought about the last time he had seen Bookman. He had went to meet him shortly after Bookman turned in his needles, hobbling out of the Order with cantankerous excuses about how his bad back and worn knees and useless eyes meant he couldn't fight anyways. This was true, so they let him go and less than a day later his innocence had already been reduced to elementary form and tucked into Heveleska to await a fresher accommodator.

It had been a bit easier on Lavi, who simply dumped off his hammer on the scientists with a request for repairs before dashing to freedom. Lenalee, who had better access to the inner workings of the Order than the rest as part administrator herself, had confided in a letter that it still hadn't been taken apart. They were getting plenty of new recruits with the other spare innocence, and Lavi was young and strong enough to keep a weapon aside for him in case he returned. It sat on a lab table, unbothered.

They sat outside of a grass hut somewhere in continental Asia. Lavi came out with a cup of butter tea for his mentor, who was hunched on the bench, rheumy eyes shut as if he were tired. He took the drink from Lavi with liver-spotted hands so winkled that tucks of skin bunched up on the bones of his fingers. Lavi threw a spare blanket over him because it was cold at this altitude.

"Tell me again why we do this. Tell me about who writes history." Bookman intoned at him as soon as Lavi sat down.

Lavi groaned. " Gramps, this is so juvenile…" But when Bookman persisted with his heavy silence, Lavi gave in and started his recitation. "We record the truth. In the wars, the winning side tells the story, and destroys the stories of the conquered. But we see all, and we hide nothing. We maintain neutrality and alone guard the world's truth."

"…Wrong. Or, not completely correct."

Lavi wordlessly let the steam of his own cup unfurl in wispy shapes into his face. They took on picture-forms, so clear that he could have divined the future from them.

"We are not just the writers of truth--we are its custodians." Bookman continued. "We may say we are neutral, but in what way? The history we have been tracking since it's beginning is the history of man-- wars between men. We look like men, Lavi. We hide. We hide everything in our appearance as men. The reason why we can do this is because men had dominion on this earth and we could run anywhere to protect our secrets after we had stolen them from whatever war."

Lavi silently beheld the warm-colored liquid in his hands. Bookman was straining beyond his damaged eyes to give him a sharp look.

"Lavi, I'm not trying to show you mercy by saying this. I'm not offering you the choice. We both already know what a Bookman must choose. But you will have to purge the imprint of an era thousands of years old. You must track the new history.'"

"I know." he said. "I understand, and I will." He had no doubts. It was Bookman who had doubts, heartbroken thoughts that he was free to have now that he was finally old enough to die. His last act of duty was to retire from the Order so that it would have no collateral on Lavi when he became free-range himself. Bookman could toss off the shroud of Bookmanhood. The new Bookman was next to him, taking small sips out of the nourishing broth he had prepared for them both. In the house were the remnants of the wife and child Bookman had left behind long before Lavi was even born.

"Why did you do it, Lavi?" Bookman asked, almost mournful, even though Lavi knew it was to his great satisfaction that Lavi himself was indifferent, smiling faintly at the grass-and-rocks landscape. "Why did you join the Bookmen?"

"I thought we're not supposed to question it. We're supposed to become it…that's what you said." Lavi attempted to inject some wry humor into the conversation. A cold wind tousled the fringe on their wraps and the last spider web scrap of hair on Bookman's skull.

"Yes. That's our official creed. But no other Bookman has watched over a mind like yours, and now I think there should be one."

"Well, gramps?" Lavi laughed. "What is it? And what's the answer you came up with?"

"It would be beyond human arrogance to be able to rationally answer the question whether one can really turn his back on three millenia of mankind." Bookman finally smiled the slightly, his crumpled mouth twitching. Lavi got up to fetch another blanket from the house; the chill was really biting and Bookman seemed unwilling to move.

"So, Lavi. Can you?"

---

Kanda, Lenalee, and Allen were patrolling close to the home base, close enough to walk back in under two hours. With that much muscle, it sounded serious, but it wasn't. They were only doing a patrol, busy work. In the past half year or so the aggression from the other side had hit a true lull. It had gotten to the point that the hot-blooded younger exorcists had somehow found time to explode the Order into a hotbed of passionate crushes and pseudo courtships of excursions into town while still in uniform.

Lenalee laughed at them and Allen encouraged them with playfully bad advice but Kanda was far less delighted. For one thing, some of the bolder, stupider ones dared to turn sheep's eyes on the senior exorcists. Lenalee had assured him that it was harmless, like students having infatuations on teachers in school. It must have touched her that the hormone-sodden bunch of them could srill have such sweet past times in a military organization. But Kanda could see it flattering both her and Allen's vanity when the teenagers would sidle up to them with shining eyes and breathless admissions of admiration--for their work as exorcists, of course.

Kanda had tried to put a damper on their indulgent attitudes by asking whether they should really be allowing underage flirtations with their spouses. But Lenalee and Allen had only looked at each and burst out laughing as if he were joking. Then they had stifled their giggles to give a loyal light kiss to each other, souring Kanda's face and warding him off.

Ever since she actually married Allen, Lenalee had been in much better mood.

"Kanda, Kanda, take a break." she beckoned to him. And to Allen, snooping about on a ledge above their heads, she yelled "Allen! It's time for lunch!"

Allen hopped and slid down in a miniature avalanche of gravel. Kanda scowled as the small stones sprayed against the side of jacket with a patter. Lenalee found a grassy area and produced a blanket out of her backpack, airing it out before spreading out stacks of boxes on top of it. Kanda silently began to help her unlid them. They revealed a multitude of delicious dishes of all nationalities--simple rice balls in their seaweed wrappers, festively bright Chinese dishes with an assortment of fragrant ingredients, headily scented Indian foods smelling strongly of heat, hearty European recipes of pasta and roasts.

"So?" The gluttonous gleam in Allen's eye that Kanda had seen too often came again. "What did Jerry make for us?"

"Oh." Lenalee coughed modestly into her hand. "I cooked this time."

Allen rounded on her in surprise. "What? Really? Thanks honey! You're an incredible cook." he childishly threw an arm around her and gave her a sound kiss on the cheek. Then he began to heap large portions of everything onto one of the empty plates, eating noisily.

"No problem." Lenalee murmured, watching him and smiling. Noticing that Kanda wasn't eating, she started to fuss with piling a plate high, scanning the food here and there and picking up a few pieces from scattered boxes. "I know you don't things seasoned too strongly Kanda, let me find the milder ones…"

They had just finished and were packing up the sauce-stained mess when a explosion like a bomb made them all whip the heads in the direction of headquarters.

"Oh no." Lenalee said when they saw the smoke.

In less than two hours they were engaging the enemy on the tallest spires of the city.("High ground, high ground! We can't meet them in street!" Allen had ordered.) They were too thick for them to reach the base. Allen wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, Clown Crown gripped in his hot hand. His wedding band glistened on his knuckle. He and Kanda stood on the roof of one the many churches while Lenalee reluctantly passed back and forth in the space between them and the swarm of high-level akuma creeping up on them.

"Lenalee, you can fly--go ahead to headquarters. Me and Kanda will fight our way through. They're just trying to delay us here. We'll meet you there. Go." Allen told her. She opened her mouth, but a leering akuma lobbed a missile over her head and it struck the platform underneath Allen and Kanda. As Kanda felt himself falling backwards as the floor beneath him crumbled, he saw Lenalee freeze in midair, dark eyes wide.

That evening, Kanda sat outside the sick room, struggling to keep pressure on the worst wound. His many other injuries attacked his ability to do this simple act. He was one in a piles of people waiting for treatment, quiet in a sea of whimpering cries pitched for attention. Beside him, two youngling exorcists moaned from broken limbs and bad cuts, which gave him more stomach pain than the pulpy bruise on his abdomen.

Lenelee was walking down the hall. When Kanda saw her coming, he gritted his teeth. He latched his fingers into the lightly textured wall to pull himself up into a difficult half-standing position.

"Lenalee! What the fuck is wrong with you? Allen's innocence extends! He could have grabbed a ledge by himself! Why didn't you--"

Lenalee's thin arm in its black leatherette sleeve swept him aside without her glancing at him. The round baby faces of the of their junior comrades stared openly up at Kanda leaning his weight heavily into the wall, panting. He glared after his comrade's small jacketed back as she sauntered off.

"You…bitch!" Kanda growled over the brisk clicking of her departing heels. He slid an inch down the wall. His arm was pinned by his upper body, so the broken shards of his shoulder needled their way out of his flesh, poking out wetly from his already mangled skin.

If Lenalee heard him yelling from halfway down the hall, she ignored it.

---

Lavi heard the skipping clack of Rhode's penny loafers on the flagstones before he saw her. Even then she was only a flurry of ever-moving skirts and lace somewhere around his waist. The girl part of her finally reached out and tugged at his hand with all ten of her soft child's fingers.

"Hey, hey, Lavi." she cajoled. He looked down to see the pink ribbon stripe looped around her head and a gesture towards a stall. "That. Buy me that."

"Rhode, you've said three times already!" he scolded her. His bag was already stuffed with trinkets she had wheedled out of him. She shot him a look that was half reproach and half begging.

This Rhode was different that the one he had met in Edo. She had the same shape as the cool-headed diminutive torturess that tore Lavi's sanity into pieces in the fake tower. But she was a different edition. She was charming.

Rhode now had the rosy flesh and blue eyes that any Victorian doll would envy. The frilled uniform with the bell sleeves and dark pleated skirt were several discarded human identities gone. They couldn't keep her in the same grade school forever, they explained. Rhode didn't age. So she was currently enrolled in one that dressed the girls in a plaid jumper and dark stockings.

Strangely enough, she liked Lavi. And Lavi liked her back. This was a serious bone of sulky contention for Tyki Mikk, when Tyki wasn't trying to fondle him.

"Hypo-crite, hypo-crite!" she had chanted when Lavi blanched the first time he had saw her again. "You can't say you don't like me because I tried to hurt you and your friends. I only did it because you hurt my Tyki, and I was angry. Didn't you attack Tyki as soon as you saw him in Edo because you thought he killed Allen? Hypo-crite!" And on with the singsongs until he started welcoming them, her with her little bird-voice.

She started tagging along with him on these trips--not that he really encouraged her, but if school was out, and she got the doorway open before any of the other Noah could stop her, and he was in town with a bazaar area like this one where it always more fun to have someone walking with you to admire the wares…

"Please!" she implored, stretching her hand towards some glittery thing on the counter that was too high for her.

"I'm here for work." he reminded her. Rhode protested-- "I'm here for work too!"-- but he took her hand and forcefully lead her away from the merchant, whose thick mustache twitched at the darling sight of them. He must have looked like an older brother--wait. Lavi sighed. How old was Rhode's physical form? Ten? He was now old enough to be her proxy father. One that had started young, but still.

"Lavi-bunny?" Rhode chirped at him as they navigated the crowds hand in hand. "Why're you sad?"

"I'm not sad, baby." he reassured her. "Just thinking is all." He paused. "What did you mean by you're working too?"

She giggled in delight, eyes sliding past him. Then she went into a free-spinning dance that spread her skirt out into a color-hatched circle. "Lookit!" she shouted excitedly. "Blackbirdies flown free from the pie!"

"What?"

"Lavi?"

Lavi turned around.

Kanda knew he looked just the same. Sleek dark hair with cut bangs framing his face, a stark black uniform silhouetting him against the colorful shoppers. And Mugen. But Lavi, he looked different. He looked like he had lost weight and rest, cheekbones higher in his thinner face. His hair had grown long enough for him to pin it to the back of his head in a loose rose-colored lariat. He was surprised to see Lavi, the way he was and here. But Rhode was in plain sight too, the first dusting of ash spreading across her cheeks.

Kanda saw Lavi make a wild snatch for her even before he could draw his sword.

"Rhode!" Lavi cried, but she merely laughed and doused her human beauty. It was like the sun had suddenly eclipsed in a column just wide enough to encircle her body. Her skin flushed with corpse-grey deathliness, and her nails blackened as if she had struck all her fingertips against stone and they clotted blood under the nail. Her gem-like irises collapsed into awning holes.

"The birdies fly in and eat bunny pie!" she sang, whipping up a doorway with a fluttering wave of her hands. Kanda started, throwing himself forward to cut her down before she could step through--she must have been the one to summon all those akuma to town. All those…Lavi was frozen, the stupid noncombatant, arms wrapped around his books as if those would shield him. He was staring at Kanda and Rhode was languidly slipping into another dimension, grinning widely at the line of expressionless, identical long-coated gunmen lining up behind Lavi with their muskets pointed at him…

When they fired the shot in unison, Lavi could feel Kanda throwing him down--

And Kanda, suddenly seeing snatches of the past as the pain struck all through his upper body--

--one of his nameless one-night stands on his knees, throwing his arms around his waist and begging him not to go--

--Komui in his office of command, reigning over his paper strewn desk like a corporate monarch, briefing him before this mission with a pen caught in his fraught fingers: "Strict orders, Kanda…only engage akuma. No matter what you see. ONLY confirmed akuma!…What else would be there? Don't ask questions, soldier…Dismissed…."--

--Lenalee, two weeks shy of her first anniversary, screaming so loud that everyone in the Great Hall could hear her…"I don't _want_ a baby, Allen Walker!"…Allen shouting back at her, furious…--

--Dragging his bitter eleven-year-old sister back through the rice paddies after she'd run off with a village boy…."I hate you nii-san!"… she was sobbing relentlessly…."I hate you, I--"

--His mother in her glistening white kimono, proud father over her shoulder, expression set…her slim fingers sliding a string of black and white beads onto his wrist and an almost angry coolness in her black eyes…--

--Lavi shouting for him that first summer day that he fell into a fountain shattered to pieces, collecting rock and water beads in spatters and shards on his pants and shoulders--

And Lavi, pulling him closer, the white front of his shirt was crimson, a smear of the color on his face distorting the shape of his close-lipped frown under green eyes freed from an eye patch. "Yuu!" he called…"Yuu…!"

---

Lavi was crying.

It had no meaning. There was no sadness in his face, no anger. He sat across from Kanda, hands folded, unresponsive to the tears running down unmoving features. A plant dripping dew.

Lavi was singing.

Sometimes underneath his breath, sometimes soaring strong and brave. Short, happy lullabies, not always in words Kanda understood.

Stop it, it made him uncomfortable, Kanda wanted to say. Lavi didn't cry. Lavi didn't sing. He didn't do much of anything, he was just…Lavi. A face that disappeared years ago. But Kanda's throat was constricted by a vice he couldn't touch. His fingers were detached and he couldn't rip off the clamp choking him into silence.

"And then the boy falls asleep, the flame inside the breathing ashes, one, two…" Lavi's lips formed around the melody.

Kanda watched the words fall out as Lavi looked into his face. Again Kanda could not move for any reason. Lavi reached towards him, smoothing out the searing pain that ate into every second. It cut deeply into him in a ceaseless flood. He could connect it to nothing; he only felt it, swollen and whole. Phantom pain.

Lavi was adrift somewhere in this miasma, walking back and forth and back to him, always. His hands, busy. Rearranging, pressing. Fighting off the agony.

Kanda opened his eyes to Lavi's sitting in a chair with his back to him, voice softening and dying:

"No matter how many millions of years, return the prayers to the earth…"

"What is that song?" Kanda asked once. How, he didn't know, because formless shapes were still clogging his mouth.

Lavi had answered, without looking back:

"A hope that no one would want."

---

Kanda woke up to a plain white ceiling. Out of the corner of his eye there was a snow flurry haze through the glass panes of a window, dappling the dim light that came in. There were foot steps beats in the morning, rubber into wood. One by one, dreamily faint.

"What the fuck!" Kanda protested, the broken croak that came out catching him by surprise. A raw blistering feeling stabbed into his upper body and he choked on his own cries of pain.

The beats became a running rhythm, louder with each one. A billowing wind buoyed the snowfall outside, rippling the paisley light in the room like water. Different kinds of almost-white. Kanda's hands pulling free of their soft, thin constraints and blurring into stripes of bandages and sickly-pale skin before his unclear vision. Sheets. Bleached sheets. Porcelain washbasin and a washcloth hanging halfway out.

Brown. Dirty. Edges to lighter impurity. The pad of a palm to a hand. It covered his mouth. It was trying to muffle his screams.

"Yuu…Yuu, stop."

An ivory off-white. Kanda's overgrown nails, clenching into his skin, trying to pull him off. The bottled up noise. The pain. He wanted to open his mouth and let them drain out.

"Yuu, I'm going to give you some drugs. Calm down so you can take them."

Fingers pried in, propping his mouth upon by pushing the two sets of teeth apart. Two hard pellets tumbled down past his tongue . They were worked down by a hand rubbing the muscles of his throat, guiding the swallow.

Some time later, Kanda slid back into focus. Lavi was yanking at gauze on his chest, trying to pull it loose. Whatever dried layer between his skin and the bandage had glued them together. There was mottled pile of them already sitting to the side.

"Welcome back, Yuu." he said as he worked on the wounds. "I was hoping you wouldn't be in much pain after the fever broke. You never complained much before when you got hurt."

The sides of Kanda's felt stiff. Like they were a few layers too thick, and that interfered with moving his head on the pillow.

"Does your face hurt? I thought I got all those bullet fragments… Hold on, I'll check again in a minute…"

Frag--? Kanda tried to touch his jaw, feel for the leftover shrapnel stuck in him. His elbows wouldn't cooperate and bring his hands to his face. Akuma bullets dissolved into the pentacle virus. They didn't leave fragments.

Lavi saw him squirming and said: "I know you thought I'd die if you didn't take the shot, because you're immune to the akuma virus… but if it's human bullets, you're almost as likely to die as I am. Your regenerative spell works best on other magic."

Kanda glanced at the window and the snowstorm serenely blew on, swirling in the four squares. It said that there had been weeks worth of this; wearing nothing but bandages, incoherence and Lavi. Lavi. Lavi, the fugitive, no longer run away, but immobile while was Kanda was immobile, watching over Kanda's should-be corpse plodding its unnatural way back to life. Why…hadn't the Order come looking for Kanda, and then tried to convince Lavi, a capable fighter, to stay…? Lavi had…somehow fought off the akuma that had been aiming for him--a harmless ex-exorcist, without even an innocence?--while unarmed, and…where was Mugen? What about human bullets? Humans didn't work for the Noah. Rhode had-- nothing made sense.

Sensing his consternation, Lavi smiled, wan and patient like a parent at the bedside of a frightened sick child. Kanda wanted to hit him, because it was not like that. He was lucid and angry…lucidly angry…but trapped in this slowly rebuilding wreck of a body. And every fiber of his intuition told him that it was somehow Lavi's fault. Not accidental. Something deliberate, made of secrets gone horribly wrong.

"It's alright, Yuu. Don't worry, nothing's wrong." Lavi promised him. Kanda's insides tightened, repelled by Lavi's peacefulness. It inspired a desperate need to get away. And Kanda couldn't. "This was supposed to happen. You made it happen a lot faster, but it's okay. It's better this way." Lavi comforted him, smoothing a fresh cloth onto him with spread fingers. Kanda twisted his head on his pillow, infuriated at Lavi's ambiguity. It sent spears of hot pain down his back, but he didn't stop. Lavi had to grasp him by the shoulders and hold him still.

"You don't understand." Lavi told him strangely. His kindness was unsettling. His gaze was absent and calm, focused not on Kanda but on the shifting world outside. A grey-scale kaleidoscope display lit his face. Kanda watched the pieces of change as the snow continued to fall. "You don't have to see any of it this way."

"See what?" Kanda finally managed to get out. It came out thick and feeling wrong. He felt tied down.

"The fall of man." Lavi replied.

He finished redressing Kanda's wounds, tucked him back him, and walked out.

Author's Note:

I think that's a good place to end it for now… I'm sorry, you're probably all as confused as ever, and thinking "…Are they ever going to fall in love?" Next chapter answers all, in a coherent manner!(ish…) and "Yes, yes they most assuredly will." The story lies in how, I guess.

…Can't think of anything else to say…mostly I'm getting a lot of "What's?" and "That's sad…" in terms of feedback. And to this I say: "I know…sorry." This story between them just kind of happened in my head and it's like I'm just writing it down. I hope it comes out OK in the end. They're going to be happy. You'll see.


	3. And I'll wait for you

-1And I'll wait for you…

Kanda spent the next span of who-knew-how-long in waking sleep. He couldn't move. He knew that sometimes he was awake, sometimes not. But since his existence was nothing but a bed, it didn't matter if there was any regularity to it. He said nothing to Lavi who would come in to care for him. Lavi would also say nothing. Spoonfuls of food were administered and bandages peeled and replaced without a single word.

Throughout something like what must have been the first week Kanda frequently heard raucous peels of little-girl laughter coming from the direction of the doorway. Hysterically pretty (and familiar), the mockery always tumbled out in childish wonder, piercingly clear in the otherwise silent house.

"Haha…he…he…thought they were akuma? Hee hee hee…And…and…he pushed you out of the way? You? He tried to _save your life?_ _Yours?_ He thought…he thought…Hee hee hee!"

Lavi's voice would always ward Rhode's teasing giggles off.

"Rhode, I told you not to go in that room…come here…"

And the smug sharp clicking of uniform shoes and the gentler thud of boots would drift away.

Sometime during what could have been the second week, Tyki Mikk's careless spill of long curls fell into Kanda's face when the Noah leaned over his bed. The Noah's eyes drooped in idle inspection as he ran his fingers across the bandages Kanda wore on his forearm. Kanda could do nothing.

"Such a liar…" he murmured. "It's not a pretty face he's weak for, so can't imagine what he finds so special about you. Oh... but you're right mess now, so that doesn't even matter, does it?" Tyki smiled in cruel pleasantness, pushing a piece of straight dark hair out of the way to get a better look the disfiguring wounds on Kanda's face.

"Tyki, how did you get in he--never mind, just get out here…" Kanda heard Lavi say somewhere behind Tyki.

"This was all you wanted? Poor trade, the entire world for damaged goods. "

Lavi had said back with a sigh "Come on, we're leaving."

As they exited, Tyki pitched his advice over his shoulder in a drawling half-whisper.

"Work hard on patching yourself up, exorcist. Or else our dear Bookman might decide you're not worth keeping."

Lavi came in during the third week and laid several flat, wrapped packages within grabbing distance of Kanda's injured hands. Kanda could tell from the uncovered hilt poking out from one of them that they were the broken pieces of Mugen. This was confirmed when he got his palm against it and the rough texture of the handle settled into its partnered callous. Before, Mugen had warmed his hands with an angry, violent life of its own.

It now sat meek and cold in his hold like a dead bird.

The room was silent and empty. White. Kanda stared into it.

Sometime during the fourth week , Kanda decided to kill Lavi.

---

Lavi blew puffs of white breath into his hands as he watched the akuma at work. He'd always thought they had nothing in their monster-equivalent of brains but madness--possible vestiges of their personalities in life, or the product of the tormented souls they housed. Back when Lavi was still fighting them, they had seemed to revel in nothing but mayhem, shrieking their joy as they destroyed all they could touch.

But now they were stacking pillars and raising walls with the same unchecked glee. Lavi watched as one tossed up a heavy plank to another crouching on the partly finished roof with a screaming laugh like a madwoman. Its coworker, hardly anything but a bulbous face like a china doll, caught it deftly with pincer-like hands. It cried an earnest "Got it!" in a metallic rasp.

The crew of a dozen or so machine-weapons seemed cheerful and coordinated and thoroughly pleased to be carrying out Lavi's instruction as they buzzed around the foundation. They paid no attention to the snowfall that was so thick that Lavi had to brush it off his hair and clothes while struggling to trudge through it. He circled around the site, inspecting their work.

When he got to the beginning of the main entrance, a formidable gate like a shrine, he stopped to rest. A busy crowd of miniature cherub shaped akuma were meticulously arranging the roof tiles above him like sister bees building a honeycomb nest.

Tyki floated into the scene in his unannounced way in light dress of a dress shirt and pants .Of course he didn't feel like wearing formal top hat and coat tails when there was no one left to be formal for. He saved that kind of honor for someone of Allen's or Komui's caliber. As it was, he was as airy and cool as one of the snowflakes.

Unlike the stark snow falling around them, however, Tyki was somewhat dirty. A rusty smear was painted across his china-fine cheekbone. There was also a smoky whiff of explosives and small tears in his clothing, although that didn't make him much different from a few months back when he had still had human employers to report to. Coal or gunfights, he came back from work pretty much the same. Only nowadays there was a greater chance there would be the odd bloodstain, and not from an accident in the mines. Or any injury of his, for that matter.

He put an arm around Lavi's shoulders.

"They're lovely things when you get used to them, aren't they?" he said lightly.

One of the chubby akuma accidentally got knocked to side by one of its fellows and bounced into a snow drift. It squirmed and shook the feathery tufts off before returning to the project with a small sway to its flight. The others parted to give it access to its own area. If there was an angry soul trapped within, its plump metal host was ignoring it well for the sake of its assigned job. They were all giggling rather disturbingly. The sound resonated bright and clean in the cold of winter.

"Yeah." Lavi said absently.

---

Although Kanda's curse had difficulty expelling the last bullet pieces, they finally dropped out of his flesh. They sprinkled the sheets with hard bits at about the same time he was lucid enough to walk again. Lavi had stopped force-feeding Kanda sedatives to make the pain bearable a few days ago. His wounds still hurt, but only as the ache of recovery--not the searing agony of his entire being catapulting towards death.

Kanda had never known that kind of pain existed before this. His unnatural gift had only allowed him to feel the duller sting of healing, no matter how badly he was injured in battle with akuma. It gave him hollow regret that he had shown so little respect to his comrades who would fight to the verge of death even without a magical aid. He hadn't known that their duties could give them this kind of hell. He'd almost laughed when he first heard, but Allen getting eaten alive by butterflies cut a much more sympathetic figure now.

Once the metal was gone, Kanda's healing powers started acting the way he was used to . On the right night, Kanda tore the bandages off with his fingers, rumpled cloth piles flowing off of his arms and face. They left behind skin that had been completely smoothed over. When he looked at his reflection in the glass of the window, the face that looked back was unmarked. His legs had never been shot, so when he stood for the first time in months, he was steady on his feet.

It didn't take much searching for Kanda to find what he was looking for. Lavi was in a room several doors down the dimly lit hallway. His back was to the doorway where Kanda stood. The walls were hidden by ceiling-to-floor maps--spots of the Order's rose-cross ran in a thick pattern across Europe, more diffusely on other continents. Small red-ink pentacles cut into almost everyone of these solemn white and black symbols. Lavi was staring up at the display with a marker in his hand. After a minute, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a watch to check to the time. He clicked its cover closed, uncapped the marker, and held it up to one of the few clean crosses left.

"What are you doing?" Kanda heard himself say before he could stop himself. For some reason, he found the scene sickening. The pentacles were like bleeding bullet wounds in the center of every flower-shaped piece. The paper looked macerated to him, barely held together for all the holes put into it. It was as if Lavi was sticking his fingers into someone that had been caught in a round of crossfire. "What is that?"

If Lavi was surprised to find his patient awake and active despite the hour, he didn't show it. He recapped his marker and put it away into his pocket before facing Kanda as if he'd been there the entire time.

"Good morning, Yuu." He said evenly. "I'm making a note that Dahini just died in Carthage."

"Who's Dahini?"

Lavi didn't answer right away. Instead, he bowed his head. Kanda shouted at him "Who the fuck is Dahini?!"

Lavi looked up. "I was trying to remember. There's none left from Allen or Theodore, so she was Lenalee's last."

"Lenalee's last what?" Kanda asked slowly and automatically, even though he already knew. Lavi played along.

"The last apprentice who trained under Lenalee. She always did teach her students that it was more important to stay alive than to win a fight--they were the only ones who held out for a while even after their master died. Not that she took her own advice, but Lenalee was a really good teacher, wasn't she, Yuu?" Lavi smiled a small smile.

Kanda said nothing as he took in the meaning of Lavi's words.

So. That was it, wasn't it? It was a done deal. Kanda had to kill him.

Lavi walked up to him and gently put his hand on the embossed end of the broken anti-akuma weapon. Beneath, Kanda's white fingers shook, bloodless from how tightly he was gripping it.

"I'm sorry about Mugen. It was a beautiful weapon. But they couldn't make an exception for any kind of Innocence." Kanda didn't bother answering him. He just stared into the green of Lavi's genuinely apologetic eye. After a moment, Lavi broke the gaze to fetch something from the back of the room.

"Here." He said as pressed two long, thin bundles into Kanda's hands. "This is the best I could do." Without thinking anything, Kanda started to clumsily undo the cloth of one with stiff hands. Sheet after sheet of rich silk, bleached like bones in the sun, came falling off under his unsteady actions. They hid the tips of Lavi's leather shoes and the sickly boniness of Kanda's bare feet. In the middle of it, Kanda gained an errant awareness that he was still wearing the black-and-white prayer beads that Lavi had given him. They were on his emaciated wrist, rattling faintly as he moved. Under a final sweep of fingertips, a magnificent black-lacquer sheath that bore a hauntingly familiar family crest revealed itself.

a pure white crane with legs of real gold. Kanda had last seen it collaring his sister like a cat as she spied on his departure from an upstairs window. When their eyes had met for the last time, she had made a face and disappeared into the dark insides of the house.

Lavi quickly found himself on his back with the startlingly clean blade pressed into his throat. Kanda could feel a warm, regular pulse under the pad of his thumb where he held Lavi still. The beat struck and retreated persistently as Lavi looked up at him.

"Lavi." Kanda said numbly. "What did you do?"

---

Kanda ravenously shoveled spoonfuls of hot oatmeal into his mouth. It was the most solid food he'd had for a month. After putting the dirty pot into the dishpan, Lavi took a seat across from him and absently rubbed at the red line on his neck.

"I have clothes for you. In the closet of the room you were using." he said.

His answer was the smashing sound of Kanda's empty bowl against the floor. Lavi frowned as bits of mush flecked his legs and ceramic pieces scattered to the corners of the room. Kanda kept his face directed down at the table top. The black and white ancestral swords of Kanda's family sat beside his hands, the straps used to secure them strewn haphazardly over the side.

Lavi kept rubbing at the small scratch Kanda had left on him, shutting his eye. "Kanda." he said in strained disproval. Kanda raised his head. His stare was unblinking through his overgrown bangs. His hands clenched on the wooden surface as he watched the muscles of Lavi's cheek tense.

"You killed them." Kanda said suddenly.

Lavi opened his eye. The straight line of his mouth betrayed nothing, but there was a hardness to his words.

"I didn't kill anyone."

"You killed everyone."

"No, I didn't. Yuu, stop it."

"You sold us out to the Noah."

"Yuu, I told you to stop."

When Kanda shot up his palms slammed into the table. His chair fell back with a grating scratch against the floor boards before it toppled over with a crash.

"Lenalee and Allen are dead because of you. Everyone is dead because of you. You betrayed the Order and let them all die." Kanda said. Lavi was very still as he stared up at Kanda. Kanda continued. "They were Vatican soldiers. The ones who were trying to kill you. They were tracking you, they knew what you were doing with the Noah…they were trying to stop you."

Lavi gave a jerk of his head in a nod.

"You're a murderer, Lavi." Kanda finished. Lavi crossed his arms, unmoved by the accusation.

"So? What are going to do about it, Yuu Kanda?" Lavi asked him simply.

Kanda stared as Lavi got to his feet, walked over to the dishes, and began to wash them.

---

Kanda sat alone on the edge of the same bed he had been recovering in for the past few weeks. As far as he knew, after they had parted ways, Lavi had went back to the room where he was recording every moment of the Order's downfall.

The house was heated, but a slight chill around his ankles and the whistling wind outside the window were reminders of the season. Kanda had been forced him to take out warmer clothes from the closet Lavi had mentioned and put them on. With nothing else to do with them, he had tied the twin swords to his belt. It was a relief to get a some kind of weight back onto his hip. It still felt wrong, though--although he had left his home before he was fully grown, he had already been using a grown man's weapons. Mugen had hidden its double form in an inactivated single sword and had been light from supernatural craftsmanship and material. The heavy steel of his father's samurai life dragged at him.

His family.

His mother and father would have never relinquished such an important symbol of their only, absent son. Especially not someone as suspicious as an outsider like Lavi. Kanda knew his parents and their old ways. An obvious mongrel like Lavi would have left the impression of dirty blood, suspect motives. Even if he had somehow worked his way into their trust with his deceitful Bookman charms, his mother and father would have never judged Lavi as worthy enough to be even a delivery boy for the heirlooms of their noble family.

Why did Lavi have his swords? What had Lavi done to them?

…His sister. She'd always been such a flighty, thoughtless little girl. So quick to forgot her status whenever any dirty village boy chased after her…she would have been the obvious one to exploit. She would have found someone like Lavi a thrilling new way to disappoint their parents--

Wait. She was a grown woman now. She had always refused to give up anything without something in return. Even when she ran off with the locals, she'd have sold herself for an adventure or a gift. What kind of an exchange would she have arranged with Lavi…?

Kanda held his head in his heat and gritted his teeth in frustration. What did his stupid little sister and whatever sordid deals she'd cut with Lavi matter in a time like this? Or the unexplained appearance childhood swords and the unfathomable reason that Lavi had given them to him? Lavi had…Lavi had…

The exorcists were dead, down to the last apprentice. All of the people that Kanda had fought beside for most of his life. Allen. Lenalee. The vampire and the idiot sailor and the rest. Lavi had spared Kanda, but--?

It didn't matter why. He had to die. Kanda had the swords to do it. Lavi had allied himself with the Noah.

He had to die.

Kanda's uncut fingernails were digging into his temples when he heard knocking. Lavi was looking at him from the doorway.

"Yuu, please come out here." When Kanda didn't move, Lavi's words became sharp. "This is important!"

Tyki Mikk was languidly sweeping bits of snow off the sleeves of a long coat when Lavi and Kanda walked into what looked like a foyer. Kanda's hand immediately flew to the handle of his katana, but Tyki Mikk simply tipped his hat in greeting and winked in his direction.

"Sleeping Beauty's woken up, eh?" he commented good-naturedly. "I see you took my advice. Good job." To Kanda's displeasure, he swept in for a closer look. Kanda was about give in to his desire to draw when Tyki's hand suddenly gripped him by the jaw. With a jerk, Tyki aligned their faces side to side in front of Lavi. Kanda immediately tried to throw Tyki off, but his arm slid through the other man's trunk like it wasn't even there. Lavi took in the entire scene with an expression of dismay.

"What do you think? Who's better-looking?" the Noah quizzed Lavi playfully, squeezing Kanda's face as if he were a child.

"Tyki, knock it off!" Lavi snapped. The Noah merely laughed as Kanda extracted himself by twisting to the side, the look he threw both of them utterly contemptuous.

"Bookman, you need to learn how to share." Tyki purred, and then threw up his hands in a gesture of peace when Lavi shot him a look. "Alright, alright, don't get mad…I'm just playing, you know…to business, then." Slim gray fingers reached inside the coat. With a theatrical twirl, a recognizable pink flower in an hourglass produced itself. Beside Tyki, Kanda started.

"Tricky little thing to get." Tyki said idly as he began to pass it from hand to hand, seemingly unconcerned about fumbling the artifact and dropping it. "They're pretty loyal to their MIA. Defended it like his life depended on it." He smirked. "Well. I guess it wasn't too tricky. It's not like they had any decent soldiers left." He cast sorrowful doe eyes on Lavi.

"Oh Lavi, I've been so bored since we got rid of the poker boy. The poker widow chased us for a while but then we got rid of her do. You'll entertain me from now on, won't you, dear Bookman?"

"Give that to Kanda." Lavi ordered Tyki, ignoring his question. When Tyki didn't comply, Lavi made a move to take the lotus from him. Tyki tauntingly withheld it from him by putting a hand on Lavi's chest.

"Not so fast. I went through a lot of trouble to get this. You owe me a kiss."

Kanda flinched in revulsion.

"Tyki!"

The Noah laughed. "Why Rhode and not me? It's just a kiss. It's not like I'm asking you for what it took for you to get those." He casually gestured at Kanda's swords sitting innocently on his hip. "And I'm prettier than that woman was. She didn't even look like her brother."

Kanda felt blood rushing to his face. So. His sister had grown up to be a whore. Lavi had gotten over his Bookman principles after he left the Order, or lied about them in the first place. And apparently one of the perks of being one of the newest members of the Earl's flock was that he got to be their resident plaything. The unbidden mental images made the choler rise to his throat and grip his arm with his free hand.

Over his thoughts he could hear Lavi arguing.

"I'm not in the mood for games. If you're not going to hand it over, leave."

"Ah. Well, I guess I'll have better luck after you get tired of your new toy." In the same swift movement he carelessly passed the hourglass to Kanda (who took it without thinking) and laid a smooth kiss on Lavi's cheek. Lavi brushed off the touch as if it were a slight itch.

With a genteel bow, Tyki vanished into the darkness of a heart-shaped doorway--Rhode was a very mindful sister who kept close tabs on all of her younger siblings. She was also tidy, and the gateway smoothed out in the floor as quickly as it had materialized.

More silence ensued. Kanda stood, awkwardly laden down with the life tokens Lavi had given him. He stared at his old friend--at his shoulder, since Lavi was looking the spot where Tyki had exited.

"We were friends."

There was a ill-timed howl from the storm outside. A lazy creak of some piece of furniture within the house stretching.

"Don't get the wrong idea, Yuu. Your sister was my--we were friends."

"Just friends?" Kanda spat. "My sister was on the fast track to being the village tramp when she was still a child. What the hell did she do with you?" He was shaking, he realized.

Lavi scowled at Kanda's tastelessness. "Don't talk that way about your sister. She was a wonderful woman. And you're not in a position to judge anyone's sex life." He then quietly added " I never said we were 'just' friends."

Kanda very slowly lowered the hourglass to the floor. The luminescence bathed his bare feet in a rosy cast.

" 'Was'?" he said softly. Lavi held his gaze readily, knowing that what was said next would determine whether Kanda would take a sword to him.

"Japan has been occupied by the Earl ever since we were kids. You knew this. Your family lived far north, which is why they were safe in the past, but once the Earl started moving, the people left in Japan were the first ones to go. I asked Rhode to see to it personally as a favor. She promised me that she could make it painless…they died peacefully in one of her dreams…I'm sorry, Yuu."

Kanda felt himself slipping out of his own thinking. There was nothing he really wanted to say--nothing he really wanted to ask, although there was so much that he understood that he needed to know. But he couldn't understand anything. There was….there was too much here to understand. Nothing here that could be understood.

He sensed that he was sinking, about to sit on the wooden boards although at no point did he make the decision to. A face flitted into his mind briefly--not his father's, or even his mother's as he would have expected. There, and then gone, like a ghost--his sister's tearful face as a child. Angry, stormy, young. She had been wild and fearless like a stray cat with everyone else, but he had always seemed to find a way to make her cry.

"Why…why didn't you save her?" clumsy words finally spilled out of him. Hallow, unmeaning. Unconsciously, he laid a hand on top of the lotus's case. "If she was your lover, why didn't you save her?"

Lavi looked at him oddly. He didn't say anything.

---

Lavi didn't change his routine for the new ambulatory presence in the house. He continued to get up early every morning, blinking out the red burn of the snow-amplified sunlight from his thin eyelids. He always padded directly to the kitchen for some coffee. This kept him informed of Kanda's improved appetitive. Missing food and dirty dinnerware told him that his friend was eating fine.

The appearance of patterned footprints in the yard said that Kanda was active and exploring the premises too. When Lavi looked out the window, he would know the tracks left by Kanda by their size and shape. Tyki came and went too, but his dress shoe bottoms were smooth while the soles of exorcist boots were textured for traction. These fussy footprints would veer here and there before circling around the house restlessly.

Lavi would go to his study afterwards and spend most of the day there. Writing, corresponding with the Noah through their strange means (Jasdevi screaming unintelligible intelligence with heads poking through the window; Lulubell, slowly and inefficiently scratching out her words with her cat hands on the floorboards because she had no intention of liking any human). Sometimes he heard the tread and pause of boots outside the shut door--but no one would ever come in. When Lavi was done with the day, he'd go to bed and start over again.

That was how he knew about how Kanda was doing: through clues instead of direct sightings. It was if Kanda were a mouse. Lavi didn't approve of what was going on, of course. But it wasn't like he wanted to flag down Kanda and find out for sure what he really thought about all this. He had several guesses already and could also figure out what Kanda would probably do for any of them. Guesses, not plans or unrealistic hopes grown out of the last few weeks while Kanda was recovering. Even with Kanda's unscheduled arrival and his subsequent demand for care, Lavi had been fully distracted by record-keeping. He hadn't had the chance to build up any expectations. Lavi didn't allow himself much self-adulation these days, but if he had one skill, it was being able to drown out other concerns once he became invested in his work.

No, he just didn't like how it felt like he'd brought home a bad-tempered street animal and set it loose in his house. Tyki had predicted as much. That combined with his sneering running commentary on Kanda's pet status dug at Lavi. Sniffing around, settling in, cunning little thing, is he, the rest of the Noah cooed at him when he reported in to their dinners. He wasn't invited to eat with them, of course--but Tyki was their agent and they took their cues from him.

They therefore teased him relentlessly about Kanda. Lavi couldn't tell if they knew they were gloating. (They were. Their victory was that complete. One of the soldiers the enemy had proclaimed to be their greatest weapon, still alive and sulking about, biding his time to strike? Darling idea.)

"Ahhh, let him be." Tyki had said during one late night visit. Rhode had nodded off in an armchair next to the fire, so the two men had relocated to the porch. He beckoned to Lavi, and lit his cigarette for him by touching the burning end of his own to it. The flare briefly colored their faces orange. Lavi didn't smoke anymore, technically. But he didn't mind sparing himself the stress if Tyki tossed him a pack like he had no say in the matter anyways.

"What's that they say about a new pet? You've got to give it the free range of the place. Let it get comfortable on its own, figure out what smells bad and bites back. It needs to realize that there isn't that kind of stuff around anymore now that it's been taken in, I mean. But pets like to learn about things by themselves, Lavi love. Acclimation, isn't that what it's called?"

Lavi had felt a sigh coming on, but let a draught of smoke mute it. Whatever Tyki said, he was only a indifferent, uncomprehending Noah. Lavi knew. There was no getting used to this.

Lavi didn't let himself mull over it too much. One day, he glanced through the window as part of his daily retinue. The hatched footprints in the yard meant Kanda had gone out, per usual--but Lavi frowned. There were no dishes in the pan, and yet the remaining contents of the cupboard insisted that Kanda had taken quite a bit out to eat…almost everything, in fact.

Lavi poured himself his usual mug of coffee and put his back to the coutner, sipping in the kitchen instead of taking it to his desk like he normally did. After a few minutes, he acted on his afterthought, setting the drained cup aside. Approaching the threshold of Kanda's given room, he swung up his fist to knock, thought better of it, and pushed it open.

Kanda wasn't there. A tidy survey of his closet and his bed said that he had had the good sense only to take the warmest items and leave the rest. Even the broken pieces of Mugen sat abandoned on the desk. (Thankfully, the lotus was gone.)

Well, Lavi reflected. It might have been the middle of the winter, but solid ice was better than the creeping damp and muck that would have come in few more weeks. And waiting until the dry comfort of summer--that would have just been ridiculous. Kanda had really picked the best time (the only time) to travel to his destination (The Order? His house? Any city he could find?).

But he even if he didn't know it, he was only out to explore. That was all he could do. There was no place left to go.

Well, Lavi thought, staring after the shiny white flats of crushed snow. Tyki had been right. Kanda would have hated that.

---

Lavi could feel the point of a foot worrying his ribs.

Lavi groaned in reprimand, because Rhode was supposed to know better than to wake him in the middle of the night. But she had infinite impatience for things like light cycles. And no wonder since she could burst into any time zone she liked with a flutter of her hands.

The prodding sensation halted. Lavi kept still, willing Rhode to go back and scavenge another playmate from her own pack. Instead he felt her foot pressing on his lung.

Much too big to be her foot. Much too heavy.

He woke himself to grasp Kanda's ankle and place it to the side. They were in darkness. The candles had burned themselves to their end while he was asleep. Lavi rolled back the covers to the futon he kept in the study for when he was too tired to go on but not ready to retire entirely. Tonight had been one of those nights, and a messy spread of notes waiting to be organized had to be curling up wetly under Kanda's shoes. Lavi could feel a damp spot on his chest.

It had been almost a year since Lavi had last seen Kanda staring out over oatmeal scraps. Kanda had returned as a voice in the black. It creaked, like an old door on bad hinges. It had said so little for so long.

"You knew."

Lavi listened without moving. He didn't even sit up. He kept his face upwards, although it made no difference which direction he looked in because he would have saw nothing regardless.

"You knew that I would come back. That anyone would. You knew I had to choose even you over what was out there."

Lavi closed his eyes and told himself that he would just get an early start in the morning. He'd promised himself, no more slacking off. He had to police himself now. There was no one left to do it for him. Tonight had just had a strange feeling hanging about, that was all. He had been weathering it like an expectation of a storm, giving himself some room for excuses about not getting things done. Strange irregularities were the best times to get caught up in a much-needed retreat.

"You have to tell me what happened. How you…knew. You're…disgusting…you…worm…you… traitor… Why…why am I still here?"

Lavi felt the motion--a disturbance in the air--of Kanda kneeling down. Slowly, in prickles of fingers clenching into him one by one, Kanda seized him by his shoulders. Lavi took up his own hands from his side and pried off this touch. Kanda's hands were so thin that his skin was loose on his bones. He felt like someone getting ready to die. Flesh jumping ship or bones shedding flesh.

Lavi took held him by the wrists. Kanda was a weight above him, suspended like a mobile from the ceiling.

"Lavi…Lavi…I am going to take your life for this. I'm going to kill you. Lavi…Lavi…"

Lavi pushed out and Kanda careened down to the side into a steered limpness. Even the plane of the floor seemed to shift with his added mass. Lavi could hear his unhappy, wakeful breathing: a shallow rhythm but metronome regular. Lavi began to feel himself giving over to sleep from the peace of the noise. As he dozed, he found that he somehow knew that Kanda was still awake even in his dreams.

---

One step forward, two steps back, Lavi thought. They were in the kitchen again. Kanda sat at the table and was eating food that Lavi had heated up for him. Lavi wasn't hungry so he stood by the sink and took inventory.

Kanda's cheeks had been scooped out. What meat was left on the bones was flowered through with blotches of red and gray. Frostbite. In the warmth of the room, Kanda's body was dutifully flushing out the damage so that rivulets of healthier white cracked his hands and face into lurid pieces. Around his profile re-coloring itself in waves like a lizard, uncombed tangles were cut to the shoulder. There were furrows running from the inner corners of Kanda's eyes that were smudgy from unrest.

Lavi cleared his throat, to ease out of the silence, and explained softly, "A long time ago, humans and Noah lived as if one, but there was a blood feud and one race engulfed the other, swallowing it alive and turning it into a small seed. And this seed was kept in complete darkness. But the conquered race never forgave and through hatred, learned how to grow in darkness. It grew and grew until the enemy burst victorious and ripped apart the host that thought itself dominant." Lavi gave a small sniffing laugh. "That's how I imagine it told, anyways. My personal conclusion is that all the big two-tribes, fraternal- betrayal myths are manifestations of an unconscious awareness to the same history. Cain and Abel, Ishamel and Isaac. The evidence is there. "

Kanda was clearly falling asleep. His un-groomed head jerked unsteadily on his neck and his irises could not be seen.

"Hey." Lavi crossed the room and slapped the table open-handed twice. Kanda's used silverware hopped and banged. Kanda drew himself up without hurry, shooting Lavi an offended, lidded squint. He was bleeding out the death in his tissues and had eaten a healthy amount. But instead of it making him stronger, his body was settling in for a long sleep, driven by utter relief for having reached a safe point. Lavi recognized that Kanda couldn't fight it after too long a span of troubles interspersed by troubled rest, so he said reluctantly, "Look, Kanda, if you'd rather sleep, I don't think you're in a condition to listen to--"

"I heard you." Kanda cut him off icily, sneering and ill to his core. "Same ultimate justice philosophical Bookmen bullshit. The humans wronged the Noah first, and that's why you to offered all of us to them like lambs for slaughter."

"No." Lavi protested. "I didn't say that."

"You never listen to what you say. You think you can get away with saying you didn't want this? What you say is what happens." Kanda was angry, but his triumph, his pointed cruelty, had collapsed. He was struggling against his own weakness, pulling hard at the words to bring them to life. His mind was flickering on things one would have thought were already well-learned. His English became strange again, like back when he had first taken it up. That accent he had worked so hard to scrub clean from his speech returned, syllables falling short and choppy. "Look at what happened, Lavi. Does it look as if what you just said was truth?" He sounded almost tearful.

"I didn't make the decision because I wanted something." Lavi said, gently and mercilessly unmoved. "No one would bother with history if it were just a list of facts, Yuu. Hearing two sides in one account is what makes it worthwhile. History isn't just something someone said and then was written down. It's not letters dead on the page; you have to come away with something you believe. I'd already heard your side of the story, Yuu, the Order's. Then Tyki told me his and the Noahs'. Which one I liked better didn't matter; I had to act on the truth."

"What truth?!" Kanda shouted. He stood wildly, hands shaking and poised stiffly in curves over the table top as if it were a piano's keys. Lavi watched with impassive alarm, expression nervous but staying where he was. Kanda's voice struck high, disturbed decibels Lavi had never heard from him before. Something had broken in Kanda; Kanda, who was so proud in his selfish, insular composure, had finally found that people were good for something after all. They had given him something to look down on and hate. They had given him an anchor. Without them, he had nothing, not even a need to be himself any more.

"They fought!" Kanda screamed at Lavi. "Did you ever see? Locking up yourself here, eating demons' food, sleeping with them…All the…there were…the bodies! I saw them! Every human…died fighting! They were still…They didn't want to die!"

Lavi did not dispute any of this. "I know." he said, unsentimental. "I believe that. That's what I came to believe from within the Order. I learned that from watching how it worked. No matter how bad things were, everyone still wanted to live. They fought so everyone could live. And they wanted it so much and fought so hard it looked like it was enough to have it."

"Then why?!"

Lavi narrowed his eye in what have been vague exasperation over the question. "They didn't know. They weren't wrong, they just didn't know. They couldn't tell me anything else or show me any different."

Lavi drew back from the instant sting of Kanda's backhand. It left a hollow drone in the depths of his eardrum. He hadn't not expected Kanda to do it, but the power Kanda had left in his emaciated, half-delirious state had taken him by surprise.

"Don't you…don't you EVER--…They didn't know?! That's all you have to say? That's what made you give us up? People died, Lavi! People who…" Kanda looked mad enough to kill that his eyes were full enough to just spill over. He gritted his teeth and forced it out in a contemptuous hiss: "…loved you!"

Lavi didn't hide the hint of defensive scorn in his next words "That doesn't have anything to do with it. Yuu, you need to listen. " He enunciated his following words with a clear sense of right. "They. Were. Going. To. Die. The era of mankind is over--it was the will of the world. Every biblical, biological, and historical prompt was constructed solely for this outcome. If one level three could bring us to our knees, what else did you think the Noah had? Humans can only see things from their point of view, and Noahs only from a Noah's, but once you get out of both you can _see_. It's the Noah's time now. There's only one God. There are no wars. This is inheritance."

Kanda raised his hand again and Lavi steadied himself against another blow. But the gesture lost vehemence at the half raise. It floated back, all slow arcing fingers. It looked like the serene greeting of men most deeply touched by the holy spirit, back when such things still happened.

"Why am I still here?" Kanda asked.

"I don't know." Lavi answered evasively. "Only you know why you came back, don't you--"

"Why." Kanda cut him off. "Am I still alive?"

"Because…" Lavi hesitated. Kanda waited.

"Because I needed you to be. For God's sake Yuu, go get some sleep. You look like you're going to die."

---

"And now, I think, you need to give me some answers." Lavi said reflectively. Kanda looked up from where he sat cross-legged in front of the fireplace. Having been fed and rested and then cleaned and re-clothed, Kanda seemed calmer. For the first time since last year, there was no ugliness to his expression beyond the usual of old days when Lavi talked. Or perhaps it was because the puffed size of Lavi cheek gave him enough satisfaction. He'd inflicted some damage already, no need to maintain aggressive appearances. He was letting the fire dry his hair. "Are you going to stay for good?" Lavi asked.

"Yes." Kanda answered, uncomplicated. "I can count on food and shelter here."

"Right." Lavi agreed. He took moment to smile as if he were a happy host glad for an extended visit from a dear friend. "What do you plan on doing here?" he added casually.

"

"No plans." Kanda grunted as he yanked a stray knot off his trimmed locks. "What could I possibly plan?"

"…You said you would…?" Lavi prompted him.

Kanda absently monitored an ember imploding to a curly sparked end. Faintest dribbles of light came out of the lump, barely marked on his washed skin. When he was done with this, he spared Lavi a look.

He saw an incomplete thirteen year old with feet that desperately tried to handle their own legs' length as girls laughed, a bleeding torso hugged tightly in a female comrade's arms, and gin from the bottle. The pieces of an enchanted hammered glumly prodded through a sack, handwritten letters thrown unthinkingly into the hodgepodge drawer of his room desk. The troubling ferocity of his sister's precociously beautiful face under his mother's soothing white fingers, the flower with dropped petals in the upper teens that he hadn't yet unpacked. Tyki's undeniably lush lips relishing the feeling of Lavi's skin.

Fields of comically starred bodies wrenched in proud agony around clutched weapons, whole cities fallen not to war but to damp and nothing and the levelness of the earth, and dissembled walls pressed into the very ground. Black skeletons that spooked with how thin and tiny they were, orchards swole with the brown smell of rot fruit fermenting in saggy skins. The gorged bellies and stick-ish arms of chirruping level fours wriggling toes into rivers clogged with gas-bloated corpses that had the same round bellies.

Unwrapped bodies of his family laid out in one of the rooms.

He saw Lenalee's hands lingering with a trickled-out defiance on children's picture book, Krory slowly swinging his wife in wide circles in the courtyard despite strict rules against dancing, the naked space on the side of Allen as Lenalee took up his other in a business-y white jacket and skirt. Komui taking no offense to his tone as he stuck out a stack of papers for him to take, Rhode diving into a doorway before guns, Tiedoll holding Marie's mutilated hand in both his own whole ones and weeping. Countless well-made cups of green tea ever ready and steaming on his tray even though it was a rare favorite in the workplace.

Things he'd never actually seen before. Like Allen's neck seized, broken, and bled like a farm chicken as his body dangled from a Noah's hand, a level three snatching Lenalee out of the air in a explosion of long hair and black cloth, the moldering hunch of Order Headquarters on the horizon.

Lavi their first day together as partners in the hamlet. Making such a beeline for the town center that his short hair streamed out backwards, at risk of being left behind.

"Never mind." Kanda said.

---

Kanda surprisingly (and maybe disappointingly?) turned out to be a fairly normal housemate after that. He'd gotten up from the fire that night as if resolved that it would be the last pet-like thing Tyki would be able to accuse him of. He was a fully functional cook and house-cleaner, often outdoing Lavi in food he made and the amount of dust he could wipe away.

He didn't do it for Lavi; Lavi helped himself to the half-full pot on the range, while Kanda would already at the table eating. If Lavi didn't finish the meals off fresh, Kanda would just get back to the food later as if he'd always intended the extra portion to be for himself. Every hard surface in the rooms Lavi used were dabbed here and there from when he unwittingly carried wet ink on his hands, but in common areas these were removed regularly. Kanda wouldn't mention these chores to Lavi. In fact, he didn't talk to Lavi.

Kanda was now never without his trademark ponytail tied back to make little tasks easier, like clearing out the living room. Lavi had walked in one day to find it bare-floored. It had taken some searching to find the furnishings casually but neatly thrown out, stacked a little ways into the wood to decompose in the wet outside air. Kanda had taken the space for himself to do his thinking and not thinking (although he never assumed the right stances for meditation) and a little sword practice.

Lavi had thought the steady stream of Noah callers and their akuma traveling companions would have set Kanda to crazed fury and instant assassination attempts. But Kanda had been very accommodating. Maybe Kanda had a sixth sense about evil, or maybe could feel vibrations of strange feet running through the entire house now that he had removed so many clutter-some wooden legs Whenever Noah came a-calling, Kanda quickly disappeared into a more secluded section of the house one. It was difficult for him to be stumbled upon accidentally and drawn into any venomous joviality or duels.

Lavi couldn't delude himself for any reason. His explanations had been nonsense, swallowed messily by Kanda's voracious curiosity and grief. They had been tossed into the swill of all things confusing, bitter, and ugly about new world as it stood , helplessly drowned in Kanda's illness and dementia. Lavi wasn't a mystic, or a philosopher, as suited his inventive discoursing on history to Kanda. He wasn't even a real historian.

He was only a Bookmen. Truth was truth. Truth was something could no longer be argued down, and history was not that. Of course Lavi he knew his reasons for what he did, about the Noah, about the Order, and about Kanda. And of course, like a historian, he did his best to confuse it with words.

But Kanda's little looks from many years ago--stop-in-his-tracks moments of sensing that Lavi knew more than he hinted and saw more with more clarity than the fog he put up--were back. Kanda was trying to catch his true mind. He knew. He knew Lavi was lying with his rambles and riddles, and desperately sheltered a crystal of compact, clear thought.

Kanda had lost several chances already from distraction, but he was no longer so young and foolish as to think that they would not come again. He was playing house only to clear his mind and trap Lavi, to catch him unaware and jolt the truth out of him. He was getting ready to do what he had to do to get to what was at the end, after all was revealed and understood. That, Lavi did not know.

Lavi bit his tongue and walked around him with eyes closed.

--

One day Rhode and Tyki came for a pleasure visit. Rhode barreled down the hall with arms held out for Lavi's neck. She flung herself into the embrace where Lavi would pick her feet off the ground and give her a swing around hug with his arm a sling for her bottom. Tyki trailed behind her, looking as cross as he always did when she did this.

"Lavi, I love you!" she crooned. She gave his neck a nipping little kiss--she swore it was because she couldn't reach his lips, forehead, or cheeks. Lavi never challenged her on how she somehow managed it all the time when Tyki wasn't around.

Rhode didn't like him that way, Lavi knew. She was not a little girl, and she had kernels of womanly wisdom somewhere in the continuum of her time on Earth. But whatever trace of romance she had in her ancient heart, she'd given to Allen. And that was only because she was smitten with his danger. She had been given to the holy-not-holy energy, his mystique. She was the Noah's fanciful "Dream," after all. But her love for him had been so sparing that she'd only pouted momentarily as her brothers and sisters strung Allen up. As soon it started, her shrieks had climbed high with excitement and Allen began to die.

It was precisely because of this shallowness of feeling that supposedly excused Rhode from her brother's jealously at the time. This was what Lavi supposed. Allen had been an impossible idea--worth it just to alleviate boredom, but with his place in the Noah's grand plan, real love would have just been stupid. All Noah were senseless, but none of them were stupid. Rhode had only been flirting with the ridiculousness of it, as if it were some line in a play written in a fit of absurdity. It was picked out and crossed into oblivion easily for being such a bad fit with the rest. Tyki had known that and so hadn't cared what little games Rhode played with him.

Lavi was different, because he wasn't so important. If Rhode did something drastic, like age her body and take up sweet lines for him, it would mean little. Lavi's life was a blink, there and gone. But it was precisely because he was unimportant, he knew she was not serious. It had taken even all of Allen's fateful charm to gather the tiny, prickish scraps of her devotion.

He suspected, instead, that she pretend-flirted with him with a sister's sweet cruelty. That was the only thing thick and warm about the Noah. Their family matters, all the nice things, and all the bad things, were starkly similar to humans'. Blood kept it going, and you could see in animals and their kin selection and bullying of runts. Rhode was bossing Tyki by letting him know she was the eldest and could have anything before him, even things she didn't want and the things he didn't want. She could deprive Tyki of her cherished matriarch's affection and take his little dalliance for herself all at once.

It was curious, but after Rhode had splashed into his soul and had thrown it all about terribly, Lavi felt they were close in such an awful way that things like little touches were trivial. He didn't have to have reservations about her invading his physical space when she had already bathed and spat in his mental one.

Tyki still made his skin crawl--Tyki had been Allen's Noah familiar, the enemy that had known him in a way that no friend had. Tyki had touched Allen's innocence while it still filed in little pieces inside his veins. He had seen what Allen became when all his hope had been taken away. The outside view of this twisted bond made Lavi throw off Tyki when he got too close.

So they could talk, him and Tyki, but Lavi used Rhode's clinginess as a buffer against Tyki's body. He said "I love you too." back to the counterfeit little girl. He rubbed ruefully at his neck with the hand that was not full of her new skirt, as if had only been a mosquito that had bitten him.

"Where's your princess?" Tyki inquired coolly.

"No idea." Lavi admitted honestly. "He keeps to himself."

"Frigid, is he? Have you had any luck with that?"

"Good afternoon to you too, Tyki." Lavi answered dryly, putting the old teasing to the grave once more. "How is everything? Don't tell me formally, I just need to get ready for the next stage of writing. Get a feel for the volume. Work, work, work."

"I want to say!" Rhode protested, yanking on Lavi's feathery tied up hair. "My turn!"

"No, it's Tyki's" Lavi corrected her as if she were a child still learning her manners. Squirming and whining, she had slipped a little, so Lavi used a deft bounce of his shoulder and hip to jostle her in a more secure hold. "I'll get to you in second."

Tyki pursed his lips mildly at this show of mild intimacy, but he did go on. "The Earth aches. It seeks redemption for itself for having condoned the ravages of the former human dynasty. The land is glutted with the reminders of their waste: plants and beasts stolen from their mother and raised tame for the slaughter, unreasonable in what they still take to fatten themselves to please absent masters. They are unknowing of how to return home despite the extinction of the surrogate parents, who loved as well as they ate their foundlings."

"Not formally, I said." Lavi said, unimpressed with this composition.

Rhode giggled. "I want to tell mine in music." she said to no one. "Like Allen did."

"You mean Mana." Lavi told her. She shrugged and slid down a bit again. She was wearing one of the pretty party dresses sown up special for her a long time ago, big and bunchy, which was why Lavi kept fumbling her. It was a bad match with hair today. She hadn't combed out her fuzzy bed head.

"Well, what else could I say?" Tyki flipped his mode of speech glibly. "I'm only 'pleasure,' remember? What could I possibly have to report even before the little ones come? You asked all of us to do some general coverage, and I did."

"Yes, fine. But I keep telling you, keep it simple. You can play around however you like once I'm gone, but this is basics. Stick to them."

"The artificially selected breeds are still around. But with no one looking after them, they'll get killed by their wilder cousins. Things will even out and get to the way it's meant to be." Tyki restated his speech succinctly.

"Thank you." Lavi said just as shortly. He deposited Rhode on a chest of drawers kept in the hallway. She would have hated him if he just set her down to stand on her own two feet, but they had an understanding that she was too big to be held for long. After a while, Lavi was allowed to put her somewhere else so long as it was interesting. She swung her feet--in street-wear shoes that hurt when she kicked--and gave Lavi a goofy grin while banging her heels against the knobs. Lavi smiled back.

He'd never met a cute kid before. Lenalee had always been sweet, even when she was young, but she had been military all her life. Lavi doubted she had a bratty moment to her memory. And besides, she was halfway to grown by the time he met her. The same went for Kanda, but he'd heard that Kanda had been just an evil child. He knew Rhode was all kinds of complicated, and maybe someone else would say she was cheating, but to Lavi she was genuinely cute.

Lavi was just going to tell her so--she always seemed to anticipate it with a smug glint to her eye--when something stopped him.

Tyki had grabbed his waist again. That wasn't unusual, he'd never stopped doing it. But this was the first time that Lavi felt a man's warm hands against his skin that way. One was snaking towards his stomach muscles with caressing motions. Another had slid deeper in and was cupping a handful of what Lavi guessed were his small intestines.

"Um." he said, not because it felt bad or good, but because he had been taken off guard. After all this time, he'd thought Tyki would never carry though.

Rhode had drawn up her knees to watch the show. Her uncouth sitting position left the white pantaloons showing as the fluffy underbelly of the swirling tucks of her cream-colored skirts. She wriggled the fingers of a raised hand in a wave as Lavi stared blankly at her. Tyki had laid himself flush against his back and was resting his chin on his shoulder so that his cheek was against the burning mark Rhode had made.

For the first time since they had become friends, Lavi imagined he saw a hint of ugly nastiness in Rhode's smile for him. For a fleeting moment, Lavi thought that she had made some kind of deal with Tyki behind his back, and this made him mad as hell. Then he realized that he had no reason to think this. Also, that getting Tyki to leave him alone was more important.

"Tyki, get--mmfh" Lavi said uncomfortably after he'd turned around--the portion of guts Tyki was holding onto shifted--and Tyki pinned his lips to his.

Immediately, Lavi got jerked away from the kiss by a strong pull on his wrist. He could actually feel the slippery folds of his organs drag past Tyki's fingers. Tyki looked around, and saw Kanda with one eyebrow raised at him.

Kanda took a step forward, still holding onto Lavi, so that he came between Lavi and Tyki. The shorter of his father's swords was unsheathed and inconspicuously held down at his side. Dressed in simple whites to the Noahs' elaborate ensembles, Lavi thought he looked like a director that had stalked onto the stage to give instructions to actors in a period piece.

Tyki only smirked and reached out, pressing fingertips past Kanda's own shirt to touch his bare chest. Kanda immediately raised his arm to put the sharp edge of the blade against Rhode on the table, tucking beneath her chin. She dropped her legs to let them dangle again, and then slung one booted ankle over the other. She gave a chirpy laugh, highly amused.

"You think you can hurt me, puppy? Go ahead and cut my head off. Maybe I'll turn into a little white cat and marry you. Or maybe I'll grow another two and eat you up."

Kanda was unfazed.

"So? You're still going to get that dress dirty."

Rhode's expression instantly became mean. She made meaningful eyes at her brother. Tyki sighed, taking his hand off Kanda. Kanda retracted the threat and Tyki offered Rhode an arm. With a graceful fall too slow to be normal, Rhode held onto him and lit back to the floor.

They didn't say words of goodbye to either Kanda or Lavi as Rhode made a sweep of her hands that forced the walls to regurgitate a door frame. They only fixed feline stares on Lavi, who did his best to stay hidden behind Kanda who kept a tight hold on him. As Tyki escorted Rhode from the scene, Lavi could see that while their eyes were black, they glittered and shone bright as stars.

"Thanks, Yuu." Lavi said after they'd gone. Kanda slid the short sword he'd used on Rhode back into its scabbard. He didn't appear to be listening. He led Lavi towards the simplified living room, holding onto him. "What?" Lavi asked warily as they walked. But Kanda wouldn't say. It was only when they got into the center of the room that Kanda even turned towards him. Kanda's eyes, Lavi saw, still held their strange tint of blue.

"Lavi, I have a question for you."

Lavi grimaced. So this was the time: in the wake of the debt. "Ask." he said. He didn't have a choice, did he?

Kanda drew the long sword that would have stuck to the walls in the hallway. Lavi eyed it with misgiving.

"Do you want me to kill you?"

Author's Note:

MAJOR EDITS:

I was getting frustrated by how clean the style felt to me in the beginning, and how clunky it has gotten. It was a clear indication that I had lost my sense of the story and was struggling to get to its end. So I went back and deleted chunks that were more my way of keeping myself writing than actually natural to the piece. Less exposition and less of Lavi's internal dialogue, and here we are.

End edit.

Okay, so I lied. Not much was answered, they didn't fall in love. Again. One more chapter then, but hope you liked well enough anyways because God knows I will have to wring this thing out…that took forever, and I anticipate the next one taking forever too…I just hope someone out there is still enjoying this…

Thank you all for the feedback! I wonder if you noticed, but I played up some things based on what you guys said. I'm thrilled you all like it, hope I can give you something satisfactory in the end.

So, um. It goes this way because it takes a little space to transition from coldness to love. I'm just letting it happen, sooooo….hopefully it'll become a good enough piece of work. I'm doing laboratory training right now, and getting into the art thing again, but I've found my productivity increases for all activities once I hit my stride, so maybe they won't interfere much with this fic's progress. God, I am tired though.

I was recently surprised to catch someone that I had considered a truly gifted writer plagiarizing a published work for one of her pieces that I had initially liked (before I happened to read the book the material was taken from). It took over a week after I pointed it out for her to admit to it and take her fic down. I think some of her work is original. And since everything she has reads great, I think she has natural ability. But now I can't be sure how much is cribbed from other sources. But I still want to read her stuff because it's always interesting, copied or no.

Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?

See you next time. Kanda and Lavi get to it there. I swear.


	4. Killing this way

Killing This Way

Lavi's freed eyes flicked from the sword in Kanda's hand to Kanda's steady and unreadable expression.

Seconds passed in silence. Kanda noticed that Lavi was still; not a single muscle twitched. He wasn't looking for anything to say or do. Well, if that was his way to set the tone, then…

"You said you needed me. I think you were the one who once told me that I wasn't good for anything but killing." Kanda told him.

Lavi blinked. His lips did something that wasn't smiling, but it was serene. "Okay. Yes. Yes about the killing."

Kanda stared at this admission, and then warned contemptuously, "If you're enough of a fool to want me to be your kaishakunin, I'll give you a death that's beneath even a dog."

"Oh. So that's what you think. That does make sense. If I'd just wanted to die, why else would I need someone else? I already know how a pedestrian suicide works…But still, you're not right, Yuu. Murder would be fine, in fact. Any kind." Lavi really did smile, but it was somehow simultaneously warm and bleak. He swallowed. "I…" he said haltingly.

Kanda laid the blade's tip over Lavi's heart. "I almost died, remember?" he said thoughtfully. "So I know that death is painful. And it's easy to make it worse than it has to be." Lavi didn't mean to step back, but the prick on his skin, so close to where Tyki had just stroked him, pulled his leg behind him. Kanda followed it.

"Do I care about justice?" Kanda was speaking half to himself now. "You've done so much. But I can't torture you. So all I have left in this world is your death." And then, somber: "You're right Lavi, we all make our own decisions. If this is yours, then it's the right one." It was as close to thanks that Kanda was ever going to give him for sparing his life.

"Wait." Lavi knocked the sword aside with the back of his hand, nicking himself for the trouble. "Wait. I mean, yes. Yes…this is right, and yes, whatever you want, but not yet."

The sword plunged into his right side, left open by Lavi's distracted hand. Lavi took one second to suck in the air in his throat, choking himself, but his head was clear as he grabbed onto the blade with both hands and stopped it from sinking deeper into him. The bone was strong enough to catch the edge of the blade. His waist and fingers opened up. His leg and the floor became sodden.

"Yuu, wait! There's something you need to see." Lavi's cry held more worry than pain or fear. For that, Kanda didn't yank the katana out of his grip, which would have certainly sliced apart Lavi's tendons. Instead, he reached over and loosened Lavi's fingers, taking care to get as little of his fingertips as sticky as possible.

"Oh…"Lavi said faintly, looking vaguely down on himself. He sank down on one knee into the puddle. "Nnngh. Oh god, that hurts. God." He murmured. The cut was beyond shallow but not deep. Lavi bled but nothing spilled out.

He looked up pleadingly at Kanda, who was staring as he ran his sullied weapon through a clean white cloth he had pulled from his pocket. The knowledge that Kanda had been prepared to do this crashed into Lavi and made him feel sick. "Yuu, please...help me get this under control…I swear, I only need a little more time to show you this, and then…whatever you want. I swear."

--

"It had to be you, you know." Lavi panted as he leaned on Kanda for support. They were clumsily trudging past the deep snow in a direction Kanda had never walked very far. It was a clean, cold day with no clouds in the sky, although the sun was so fierce and dry that the top of the snow banks had melted and then refroze into a crisp. Their winter boots crackled as they broke into this thin mirror crust over and over again.

Lavi was stumbling more than Kanda, so Kanda had to jerk him back up when he threatened to fall completely.

"I couldn't save Allen. Goddamn him, it was like asking Satan to pardon Jesus. Or, I don't know, asking Satan to give Beleezebub as a playmate to a kindergartener." Kanda pulled on him impatiently as Lavi rambled.

"He belonged to them, but he was going to kill him. He was like Lucifer for the other side. And that guy's supposed to lose. Because he was a traitor. The traitor always loses." He clutched at his injury. Kanda didn't help him, knowing that the occlusive dressing they had put on Lavi before the left was doing all that could be done.

"They're the Noah!" Lavi suddenly shouted out into the open. "What did you expect? You know how it goes, right? The story says two from the Old World are allowed into the ark. Two." And suddenly he was crying. He and Kanda were so thickly wrapped in winter outer wear that he couldn't even reach his face to wipe it. Kanda dropped him by accident.

"Who else could I take? Lenalee? She's his wife. She was in love with him. They had to go together. And, you know what? She would have forgiven me. I would have completely destroyed her and made her go on living when she didn't want to. And she would have forgiven me! They all would have. They would have looked past the truth and forgiven me. Every one. "

He swore as Kanda drew back in a crunch of ice, waiting to see if Lavi would try to pick himself up or  
rage some more. He raged.

"You're all humanity's got left, Yuu." He went on. "And I know you don't give a flying fuck about anything as pointless as forgiveness. So what will it be? What's your judgment? Revenge? Mercy? What do I deserve?"

"... Mana."

Lavi jerked his chin, caked with white powder, up at the other man. Though the bottom half of him was flaked over from their walk, Kanda's look was clean in his face so long out in the cold that he was white from it. The jacket Lavi had given him was Kanda's choice color, a deep indigo. Angel theme colors.

"I just thought of it. That's what they planned on naming their first child. Mana." Kanda frowned at the icescape before them.

Lavi was tempted to snap "So what?" but the memory of Allen and Lenalee, kind-faced, strong, held him in check. "Oh I get it." He groaned. "Cycle of life and all that. Going back the father. Poetic. It's beautiful. "

"That's only half of it." Kanda said. Lavi wasn't watching his face or tone, so he didn't know Kanda's feelings on what he said next. "Allen said if they had a boy, they were going to name him Mana after his father."

"I got that!" Lavi shouted. He made no attempt to unburrow himself, but began to sweep dry the water forming on his brow with his bandaged and mitted free hand.

"But Lenalee said she would name the child Mana even if they had a girl."

Lavi took his hand away from his eyes.

"She came up with it herself from the story of Exodus. She was thinking about the Jews' forty years of pain and suffering in the desert. They had nothing. No home, no peace. But she said they were able to live on because every day, they had mana to eat. She thought that it meant… "

"What?"

"'There will always be sweetness enough to live.'"

---

They arrived. Kanda could feel a sickening knot forming in his stomach as soon as he recognized the shrine-like gates, but he held firm to Lavi draped across his shoulder. He walked on as quickly as possible while supporting another person, not daring to examine the structure too closely. Lavi, who was exhausted, said nothing but concentrated on trudging forward the last of the way.

When they slid open the entrance to the threshold, Lavi wearily waved towards the other side of the room, where a paper and wood door was shut fast.

"Go ahead and look around. I need to rest here." He purposefully pushed himself off of Kanda and curled into a convalescing ball in the corner. Kanda, however, did not take another step but dropped the wrappings around his head in a heap by his feet. He looked around slowly. Though unfurnished, every beam of wood, every red-stained floor plank, was in the right place.

"But this is the Baltic region." He whispered, his voice touched by disbelief. "I know it is."

But Lavi had already tuned him out to meditate. His eyes were squeezed closed and he had pulled himself inwards tightly to protect himself from the cold of the unheated house. His face was hidden from Kanda in the folds of his coat, so Kanda had no choice but to walk on.

The place was as sprawling and complex as he remembered. But without lit fires or lamps, and without servants or guests crossing his path, beaming with approval, it was eerily quiet and gray. Filmy light doused the thin paper walls and projected a dusty haze on every surface of the halls.

There were many doors, and several times Kanda opened a random one. Most opened to empty rooms, bare like unfilled boxes. A few had sparse, scattered items and furniture in the simple style of his memory, but haphazardly placed as if someone had been looking to unload quickly and arrange later.

As Kanda got closer to the center of the house, the operating site of a home, these spaces became more cluttered with crates and barrels of what looked like food. The kitchen, not that he had known it very well in his time, was fully stocked with the cast iron pots and pans and bamboo utensils it would need to serve a large household. It was annexed to a courtyard. Skinny and dormant trees dotted it in artful arrangement, the miniature conifers agreeably live looking under their cover of snowfall. Aesthetic colored boulders were stacked around and beneath them.

Kanda had to pass all this until he could enter the dining room across the way, which had a low table and cushions on the floor. Settings were placed for four people to have tea. He leaned down and put a hand to the knobbly, clay-green metal of the kettle's lid. Freezing. He blew his breath into his hands to erase the chill. Vapor fogged upwards like a substitute for a hot drink's steam.

---

By the time Kanda reported back to Lavi, the sun was midway to gone. Lavi was in the same place, but had moved slightly in his sleep so that the lids of his eyes were visible above the edge of his scarf. He was so pale that he glowed a color near identical to the hot sun dipping down through the paper walls. Kanda knelt, and set down two cups of tea by Lavi's feet. He put a hand on Lavi's shoulder, waking him gently with the weight of touch. Like a friend.

Lavi opened his eyes, squinting in confusion at finding Kanda sitting next to him, relaxed and with a warm drink clasped in his hands. He breathed in a deep waking breath and twisted to the same knee-drawn position. His toes nudged a matching porcelain cup, spilling some but not tipping it over.

"Careful." Kanda admonished So Lavi wouldn't have to reach, Kanda leaned over, picked up the cup himself, and passed it to Lavi. Lavi took it uncertainly and sipped. It tasted normal. Bitter wateriness, which was how Lavi always felt about tea himself. There was nothing in the house that could have made a poison clever enough to be undetectable.

"How did you do this?" Kanda asked him conversationally as they drank. Lavi frowned at him.

"I… visited your house. Forged a letter from you to fool your parents. Got a good look at the place you grew up…Your sister had your swords, though. I had to go find her." he told Kanda haltingly. He put the cup down. "I liked them all. They were good people."

Kanda sighed, mysteriously annoyed. "They were alright. If they were really good people, they would have raised a son who would have written to them. Even once."

Lavi had no response to this, but awkwardly tried to scrounge one from his befuddled mind anyways. Meanwhile, Kanda was surveying the sturdy ceiling beams with interest.

"You couldn't have done this all yourself. Did the Noah help you? Why would they do that?"

"No. Sort of. They let me have an akuma work crew. They gave me pretty much whatever I wanted. Still do. That's where we get our supplies from, and how I got stuff for this house. The world may be ruined, but there's enough for two people. "

"You've certainly got them wrapped around your little finger." Lavi noticed that there was a trace of a familiar sneer in that sentence. Kanda seemed to notice it too, and reined it back. His tone was more gentle as his continued. "What are you really doing here, Lavi? What really happened? I'm listening now, so don't try to tell me something else and think I can't hear you hiding the truth."

Lavi shut his eyes. He was hoping he'd be dead before it came to this.

"When you brought in Tyki Mikk, he…offered me a chance to save history. History, with a capital H. There were things he talked about that…" Lavi trailed off, strangled.

"Take your time." Kanda was powerful and composed and the air smelled of strong, cleansing matcha. He sat unseen in darkness.

"He told me things that had happened and would happen. Not even just the things related to the war, about everything, all over the world. He told me what to look for, to know that he was telling the truth. Signs. So that I couldn't doubt him. So that I would believe him when he said…that there was no way for us to win. That God wasn't on our side." Lavi covered his face with his hands.

"They all happened, one by one. The earthquake in San Francisco. Bloody Sunday. Relative theory." Lavi knew these things were meaningless to Kanda, but he went on anyways. "But that doesn't matter. Even I could see it, in the hidden history. The holes in the biblical records--Why do the Noah exist, and why did no one notice them until recently, if they've lived forever? Why were there so few of them? How could humans still hold the Earth when they Noah are the tribe with all holy blessings, and godly powers, and all we have are our Innocence and tools? How could we not know anything, after all this time? I always thought it just our ignorance, that the Bookmen could do so much. That it was no one's fault. But--" Lavi's breath hitched.

"--But Tyki told me, it's because Bookmen could only ask humans because the Noah did not want to speak. If I went with him, they'd answer my questions. And the first thing he wanted me to know is that God is not our side."

"I don't believe in God." Kanda's words came out the room, which was now blackness. "But that's who they said the Innocence came from. Who was looking after us, if not God?

"No one. They're just artifacts of the last war. Old trash. Worthless except for their last vestiges of power, and the whatever you project onto them. They get destroyed all the time, but we've never been able to kill a Noah, remember? Not completely. Whatever their Allen was like then, he was like the Earl is now. Traitor of his own kind destined to lead the holy people to victory. Yeah." Lavi said through a thin smile at Kanda's shudder next to him, his first true reaction. "You noticed, didn't you? The Earl doesn't look like the Noah. He looks human."

"Lavi, not all of this is making sense."

"Of course it doesn't. That's because it's senseless. There's no explanation why it's like this. Why did Cain kill Abel? He was jealous that God loved Abel's offering of a lamb better than his offering of fruit. But _why_? Why did God choose blood? No one knows the reason. Maybe he just likes seeing it spilled. Every few millennia, Noah triumph over humans or humans triumph over Noah; and when enough time passes that no one remembers the fight, the war breaks out again. Our turn's over. Simple as that."

If Kanda was reluctant to accept this, he didn't bother pursuing the doubt and said instead "I would have chosen to die with my own kind."

"Yeah. Well." Lavi brushed him off. "You weren't given the choice, I was. Soon the Noah will propagate, and any people needs a history. I was…commissioned. Be their storyteller, teach them how to tell the stories. They paid for it with my life, and the chance to keep alive the Bookman clan's knowledge even beyond the end of humanity. And even to complete the records…really complete them, and say what I want about the people I knew."

"That's all?" Kanda scoffed.

"Go ahead and say it, if you're going to. I come cheap, don't I?" Lavi gave him a bright, bitter little smile.

"Not so cheap, I suppose. You did bargain for my life. And this house."

"No." Lavi mumbled "I didn't. Not really. It was just Noah and their fun. They told me I could save one person, going by the two's of the first flood…they just wanted an artsy way to watch me suffer through the choice. They're like that. You've noticed, right?"

"I noticed. And?"

"And?…"

"And why'd you take the bait?" Kanda goaded him.

"Oh…I don't know… I was weak…I couldn't let humanity go…I know I should have just given you peace. But please, Yuu." Lavi pleaded. "Can't you try to see it my way? It was wrong, but I couldn't…I couldn't stop myself. I thought saving even one person would give me some peace."

"How pretty." Kanda's laugh was just that. Pretty. "But I think I get it now. Alright, thank you for telling me."

Lavi didn't even have time to reply an awkward, confused 'you're welcome' before Kanda pulled him close, so that Lavi was forced look directly into his face. He smashed his other hand into Lavi's cut.

Lavi cried out as pain flooded his senses. It had been too long since he'd been a soldier to bear such pain with dignity. He openly struggled, pushing helplessly at Kanda. "Yuu, don't! It hurts!"

"You wouldn't have let me live if you weren't hoping for an easy way out of what you did to us." Kanda accused him in soft tones. He dug his fingers in deeper, forcing out an unhappy mewl. "So I'm supposed to kill you, …but then what, Lavi?"

"No--" Lavi gasped, squirming, but Kanda raised his voice, speaking over him.

"Then I'd be left to choose to live in a world run by Noah--things I've fought and hated my entire life, Lavi!--or suicide. You thought this dollhouse would be enough to distract me--?"

"It wasn't like I didn't want you to be happy if you could be! I tried!" Lavi protested, trying to seize a sense of calm against the pointless panic.

It was fine, wasn't it? He'd already known it would go this way, right?

So why did he feel angry? Like fighting?

Why did he feel like crying again?

"Happy? You thought I would be 'happy'? That really gives it away. When have I ever acted as if I wanted to be happy? Everything you did, you did for yourself. You know how I know? You're a selfish bastard. You've always been one." He began to laugh again.

"…Fine. You win. You got it." Lavi whispered. His hand slid out from under the folds of his coat and grasped the white wrist of Kanda's sword hand. "I didn't care about what you wanted. I wanted to be a Bookman. It made me want to die. I wanted you to decide for me because I couldn't." His eyes narrowed like a child's daring an adult to keep a promise. "Was I wrong? Will you do it? Will you kill me?"

When Kanda looked at Lavi, Lavi could see his decision forming . It held sweetness. It held malice.

"Mercy, Yuu?" he choked out finally, unable to wait any longer.

But Kanda pulled his arm away.

"No." he said lightly. "You said it, didn't you? You need to live. Go teach those monsters to remember how they murdered us."

---

In a curious reversal of their roles, Kanda ended up taking Lavi to one of the central rooms and arranging him in a futons. After Kanda had reopened his wound, Lavi couldn't have made back to the main house if he wanted to. Lavi immediately set to sleep, and Kanda went to fetch some coal and burners. They were where Lavi had said they would be, in the replica storage shed out back. He traveled from room to room, heating a knot that were that were close to the kitchen.

The available supplies didn't have much variety, but Kanda managed to open a barrel of rice and put together a meal with some vegetable pickles. Kanda was impressed that the rats hadn't gotten into them. The barrels had been sealed well. (Not that he'd seen any rats here, which made quite the difference between Lavi's domain and the rest of the world. Maybe sheer animal fear kept them far from where Noah lurked.)

When he was done, he carried a tray back to Lavi's room, complete with more cups of tea. By then, thanks to Kanda's efforts, the place was comfortably warm. Nevertheless, Kanda was surly as he sat down to eat, unsympathetically jerking Lavi awake.

"It's a mess in here." Kanda complained. "Where are your akuma workers? Why can't they clean it up?"

Lavi wearily reached for the bowl of food, gingerly rolling to his good side so it was possible for him to handle the chopsticks.

"They're just akuma. You can point and say 'put that there' but not 'make the room look nice,' you know? I didn't have time to get things done myself after you got here--and then I had to write." he said.

"Feh." Kanda grouched. "Just make sure that they know to bring things here for a while."

"I can tell them." Lavi assured him after he swallowed a mouthful of hot rice. "One of the Noah will come looking for me. Lulubell, probably. It's her turn next."

"The cat? Good, but don't let that thing change into Noah form. And then tell them to stay the hell away from here. I'll give you back to them when you can move again."

Lavi looked at him questioningly, taken aback by Kanda's newfound authority. Kanda caught this surprise and smiled grimly.

"This is my house, isn't it?"

When Kanda had finished eating, he got up and left Lavi alone in the room. Soon, Lavi heard the scrapings of heavy things being slid across the floor. Kanda was rearranging things to his liking. He really was intending to settle down here.

He laid back, thinking wryly that Kanda must have endured similar while recovering. There was the deadness of winter outside. And on the inside, a caretaker full of mystery, but with thoughts dark enough that the patient knew better than to ask.

---

When Lulubell came in, she did not do so gracefully. Her little cat feet swept up and over the threshold soundlessly, but as soon as they hit the floor, she stuck her ropy tail straight into the air. Kanda didn't stop her from stalking into the room where Lavi was waiting. He even slid open the door for her, so she wouldn't have to morph into Noah form. She gave Kanda a glance of greatest feline contempt before going in.

Kanda had known cats before, a long time ago when he was a child. They'd protected the storerooms from mice. He hadn't liked them. And he'd seen the things in bad moods before. If Lulu had been a male cat, and if Lulu didn't have the greatest pride of all the Noah, he was pretty sure she would have sprayed the doorframe to show just how she felt about being here. Lavi had said that out of all the Noah, she detested humans the most. It must have been unpleasant to have to come calling on the last one on Earth. Regardless, since this was his house, Kanda only showed her courtesy the he'd learned from watching his parents receive guests.

As soon as he shut the door after her, he heard a murmur from Lavi. Immediately, a woman's silhouette burst into being from the floor. Kanda had lit lamps for a late evening. Lulubell's shape flickered darkly against the glowing panels of wood and paper. As the last womanly curve fell into place, Kanda heard the Noah's and Lavi's voices erupt into a quarrel.

Lulubell was not the gesticulating type. Holding a beautifully proud position of hands on hips, her words came out smooth, but low and angry. Kanda had never heard Lavi fight with anyone either. But Lavi also spoke composedly, if sharply.

He had the final word. There was a soft thud, as if something padded had hit the floor. Sure enough, after Kanda pulled open the door again, a small black cat darted out. The animal halted in front of him and spat out a hiss, hair on her back raised, before taking off for the main door at a slow run. It seemed as if she didn't want to look as if she were being chased off.

"Catty bitch!" Lavi said crossly as soon as Kanda came in.

"What did I say about having a Noah in here?" Kanda said instead of replying.

"Cats can't talk, Kanda. She would have scratched up your floor."

"What did she want? Why were you fighting?" Kanda asked, ignoring this.

Lavi sighed. "She hates you, for one thing. Also, I told her that I was taking a break and why, which only made her angrier, since it's your fault."

"I didn't know she was so attached to you. Do all the Noah love you so much?"

"No." Lavi corrected Kanda shortly. "She hates me too. She puts up with me because I serve the Earl, but she's mad that I'm not fulfilling my duties. She kept saying 'master will not be pleased', and 'master spared your life only for your services'. I told her to have everyone leave transcripts in my library, so I can get back to them later--that's what history is anyways, putting together something from primary documents. I'm the only one on this project, I've been working nonstop for years--I take some time to recover from a sword wound, and she accuses me of going on an undeserved vacation? Crazy woman! She's the worst of all of them."

Lavi looked over at Kanda, expecting some kind of a response to his list of complaints about his job. Instead, he saw Kanda in deep study of a lamp's little flame.

It was the first time Lavi had said something so directly about working for the Earl. And he'd spoken of Noah easily, as if they were merely his coworkers and not harbingers of destruction and violence, who'd successfully pulled off the apocalypse, by the way.

Noah. There only Noah in the world. They were what were normal, and he was the abnormal. Lavi had known this. He'd lived in it. Kanda's turn to wake up and accept reality.

"Yuu?"

---

Lavi was nowhere near as bad as Kanda when he'd been brought in by Lavi, but Kanda had benefited from healing powers and heavy medication. Lavi ended up taking about the same time to heal. It was boring work, but Kanda made a run to the main house and picked up some paper and inks along with some other things. Lavi slept and wrote (for himself) while Kanda fell back into his own habit of cleaning and cooking. There was more to do here, since Lavi's house had been pleasant and functional long before he had ever come along. Besides that, his family compound hadn't had a dojo, but Lavi had thoughtfully added one to the plan of this one, tucked into a corner where the difference wouldn't be too obvious. Kanda would take a charcoal burner with him and would swing away the hours.

And for a lack of anything better to do, they talked. Like they used to, half a lifetime ago, when they were young.

Kanda was generous. He answered, without embellishment, the questions Lavi couldn't help asking about their old friends and what they had done with their last years. Lavi, to his credit, never dissolved into hysterics again. He could have been asking about books he'd left behind in the Order's care--if anyone had read them, if they had been put to good use before being retired?

He would smile faintly to know that Krory had also wanted children, and that had been his wife's suggestion that the first girl be named "Eliade". Lenalee had nervously asked Kanda to be her "best person," and had ended up strutting off in angry dignity. This made Lavi laugh.

But as they were men who had not seen each other in a while, there was nothing to it but getting to the sex eventually.

They swapped stories of girls and women and boys and men over lunches and dinners which had gone to the simple and elegant meals of Kanda's childhood. It was a distinct change from of the simple and hearty dishes they had eaten in Lavi's house. Back then, Kanda had still been cooking in the style of roadside camps like Tiedoll had taught him, as suited the Western ingredients in Lavi's pantry (akuma loot from the aftermath of a world-wide riot). Here, Kanda surprised himself by being able to recreate what had been made for him by servants' hands many years ago. This, he'd realized one day, was because Lavi had correctly instructed the akuma in how to stock Kanda's kitchen differently and also because Kanda had good senses for this kind of thing.

So they ate vegetables and meats that tasted of vegetables and meats and not of seasonings. And now that Lavi had had some for himself, and there was no society making it awkward for them to exist around each other afterwards, they talked about their lovers.

"…She wasn't my first kiss, that was when I was fifteen just grabbed some innkeeper's daughter behind the stable. Suman walloped me good for it too-- it got us kicked out before we were done with our mission. But she was the first woman I…met right after Bookman died. I didn't tell her anything, but I didn't have to--when she kissed me for the first time, it was because she knew I was in pain and wanted to do something for me." Lavi gave a sheepish grin, as if he were confessing an embarrassing secret--even though they had talked about more graphic experiences already . "It was new, but nice. I didn't know I'd feel that good, knowing she cared. And--well, yeah, she was a lot of firsts for me. You?"

Kanda wrinkled his brow in thought. "My most first time," he said finally. "Was with someone older. I gave, I think, Marie the slip, and after I got to the address, he--"

"Hey Yuu!" Lavi put up a hand of warning. "Not that kind of conversation right now--I mean, yeah, I'm sure you made great jailbait. But I'm talking about…I don't know, that kiss. The one you remember."

"You sound like a woman sometimes, Lavi." Kanda said scornfully, gracefully placing a piece of sliced fish between his lips.

"That's not it, Yuu--it sounds like you're the one who never got the point!" Lavi gave him a sly smile.

"Point of what?"

"Kissing."

"What do you mean, the point of it? You do it, and then you go further." Kanda stated bluntly. He was a bit irritated that he had undercooked the rice today. The too-stiff grains were getting wedged in the cavities of his teeth.

"What? You really think that's it?"

Kanda shrugged indifferently from beside Lavi's quilt.

"Jesus!" Lavi exclaimed. "You really do! Well, then I feel sorry for you…-you've never found anyone to kiss like you mean it and now you can't--And, I'll say it before you do, shut up, I know that's my fault--"

"I've never had to kiss anyone like I cared to get what I wanted." Kanda's pointed out, getting a bit sharp. To his annoyance, he could feel his temper prickling. He was sure that in principle he was apathetic to Lavi's banter, especially on such a banal subject. But that was no reason for Lavi, with a bite of rice stuffed in his cheek, to prattle on so fearlessly.

"That's just what I'm saying! You know, Yuu, sometimes I think being ridiculously beautiful spoiled you. You only did it as part of sex. That's an entirely different thing. It's as if you haven't kissed anyone at all." he lectured between chews.

"Well then, what about you?" Kanda challenged him, unable to keep the bite from his voice. Lavi furrowed his eyebrow in distaste.

"Hey…what's with the change in tone?" he objected.

"Just don't give me a hard time, especially if you're going to be a hypocrite about it."

Lavi swallowed. "What do you mean?" he said in clear innocence, almost convincingly.

"You were just fucking around too--you can't say you cared about any of them, you knew they were going to die, and you just let them--you did them and left them--like my sister--"

"Yuu!"

For the first time, after all the yelling and accusation about Lavi being a murderer and a traitor and worse and Lavi only nodding along, it looked like Kanda had crossed a line. His jaw snapped shut, not in regret but in shock. He'd done the impossible. Lavi was offended. He was scowling.

"Of course I cared." he slowly, glowering, but not directly at Kanda. He focused on the patterns of his comforter. "I was trying to understand them, Yuu. It wasn't…corrupting the history anymore, they were the history. Going to be it. I wanted to know everything about them, even the part of them that was their bodies…and how they tried to feel something using their bodies."

Lavi paused, needing a moment to perfect his thoughts. "I think…the Bookmen before me had it right, Yuu. Sex really was a distraction from record-keeping, which is why they didn't do it. But at the same time, sex is a core component of humanity…ignoring it would be like leaving the record unfinished forever…so maybe, we always knew that we would have to try to understand it at the end…and…that because it's such a primal, irrevocable thing, that it would be there to be understood, even at the end of the world."

Kanda's features had gone slack with disgust at how Lavi was using their conversation to put some defining points to his own philosophy. He hated it when Lavi started talking at him, not with him.

"Whatever," he snapped. "Just, if you're going to start on how unfeeling I am, and then say you loved and adored all your old lovers, think about what you did to those people in the end--"

"Yuu, I didn't say I loved them." Lavi interjected smartly. "I said I tried to understand them. As a Bookman. Maybe as a human, so I'd be able to remember that for them too." Lavi closed the topic neatly, having just understood it for himself now. Satisfied, he resumed eating his meal, leaving Kanda to moodily stab his own with chopsticks and brood over it was just too damned easy for Bookmen to think and talk.

But, noticing his mood, Lavi brightly started talking about the best blowjob he'd ever had (not the same girl) so that Kanda could relate and they could get into the flow of talk again. Meals were boring spent in silence, after all.

---

When Lavi was well enough, be began to hobble around the place, doing thoughtful small things. He started setting the rice to cook while Kanda was still in the dojo so that they could eat faster, with Kanda only needing to prepare the sides when he came back. He swept the halls, pulled tender weed sprouts from the garden and sorted out the edible ones, and did the wash for the clothes he'd had brought here as well. It was a good thing that he and Kanda were similar in size. Lavi had lost some weight from going from philosopher-warrior to pure philosopher. The sword injury hadn't helped any either.

One day a stack of notes snuck its way into their supplies. It hinted to at least one Noah's growing discontentment. (The only that seemed sane enough to care was Lulubell, but you never knew.) Although they had avoided Kanda's house and had made no attempt to contact Lavi, its appearance said that they were watching the place, and wished him back in their affairs now that he was mostly recovered. Lavi ran his eyes over it, but didn't bother doing anything else with it. He had a whole library's worth of backlog he could throw it into once he got back, he was sure.

After all, even though he was injured, and even though Kanda could be abrasive to live with, it was a refreshing change-up from his life as the Noahs' historian. With all the late-nighters and squabbles with a whole cast of strange characters, sometimes it had felt as if he were back at the Order. Implications aside, that part of it had tired him out.

There was something bugging Kanda, though. He was getting up before the sun, so Lavi often missed him in the morning. As soon as Kanda lit the fire and brought in chopped wood, he wandered off into the dojo or the woods and would come back around dusk. Back to the good old routine.

He'd learned that he could get Lavi to do things by leaving a note. So Lavi slid open a door and sat on the edge of the wood platform, taking the mending he'd found in his chair with him. Kanda must have ripped it on a branch. He could hear mating birds shrilling at each other in the surrounding trees. Passable substitute for cicada screeches, if the season weren't wrong. It was warm enough for it, though. Lavi wondered if the hike in temperature had anything to do with the Earl's plans. Reverting to an Eden-esque clime to suit the new race, maybe?

Oh, who cared, he thought as he closed up the tear. He was on break. If they wanted that noted, the would have to tell him. Or maybe they already had somewhere in the paper mountain that had been on his desk. Lavi figured that needed one more week, tops, before he should head back to his own place. For one thing, it wasn't good to fall too far behind.

Also, Kanda had been looking pretty pissed lately.

Lavi didn't have to think hard to figure out what it was. He knew from their conversations what he and his Noah conspiracies had interrupted. Two years worth of losing everything you had and then constant fear/rage made a damned good distraction. But fact was that Kanda was still relatively young and there was nothing to do around here. As for Lavi…well, fine, maybe he had gone a bit overboard with the few years of freedom he'd had, but he hadn't forgotten what it was like to live his first almost-30 years in peaceful abstinence. He could do it again. But he didn't think Kanda had it in him to do it gracefully.

But nothing to it, really. What was Lavi supposed to do? Every man knew how to deal with forced celibacy, and that didn't need any outside help. Solitude would be the best thing. Time for Lavi to clear out.

Lavi nearly dropped the shirt when he heard door frame rasping against its runner. It was Kanda, of course. Who else? Why be surprised? A hand dragged him into the house. Lavi stumbled into the room--his.

"What is it?" Lavi asked, bewildered. He stuck the needle in the sleeve and tossed the whole thing aside. Had the Noah did something to bother Kanda?

More than half of Kanda's face was blocked out by shadow in the unlit room.

"Is something wrong, Yuu?"

Kanda reached out and took Lavi's chin in hand.

Lavi looked up sharply. Kanda had never touched him that way before. His fingers remained light on the edge of Lavi's jaw.

"You know." Kanda said thoughtfully. "You're actually…"

Lavi didn't even get a chance to close his eyes before Kanda closed the distance. When Lavi did nothing to help or hinder him, Kanda actually placed a hand behind his head and the other on his back to bring him near enough. His mouth got trapped. He couldn't get away. It was as if the long-absent touch of tongue was a paralyzer.

"…Oh." Lavi mumbled. He could feel himself turning red. He twisted in Kanda's arms and looked away. "Oh. Yuu, I don't think I can do this."

"Mm. Why not?"

"Because…" Lavi thought, because Tyki said this would happen, because I don't like men, because you need this and I owe you, and because I'd have to live with it.

He breathed out in the room, having nothing he could say to Kanda. "… I don't know" slid out of that breath; the words rode out on its weakness. Fragile, poorly put together, they vanished from the pressure of rough fingers--instantly arousing touches stroking down hard on his penis through his pants. Lavi jerked; there was a gasp and a rustle of disturbed sheets in the dark as he was pushed down onto the futon.

"Yuu, I said I don't want to do this! Get off me!" Lavi hissed as he struggled, getting angry. He winced when his recently healed wound gave him sharp pinches of pain. Kanda held him down by bracing an arm across his neck. He was kissing Lavi again, his hand deftly sliding down past his bandage and past his waistband to touch him skin to skin. Lavi made a sound that could have been pleasure or disgust.

"Just tell me when it stops feeling good."

It was nice for a while, which was why Lavi let it go. But he quickly found out that this kind of sex was a lot of ugly pain punctuated by a few points of ugly pleasure. He couldn't help fighting at times when it felt like Kanda would never finish. But Kanda pushed his palm against Lavi's throat to tilt his head back, as if not having to see it would be a comfort. Lavi squinted at the ceiling through half-closed eyes, hot blood pounding in his temples. He kept his lower lip clipped between his teeth.

Afterwards, when Lavi tried to get up on shaky legs to wipe himself off, Kanda pulled him back and did it for him with the sheets. Lavi lay back on Kanda's chest with Kanda reaching between his legs, their shirts stuck together with cold sweat. Whenever Kanda leaned forward over his shoulder, Lavi could smell what they had done, clinging to his black net of hair.

Shit, Lavi thought there, clammy, stung, with Kanda feeling around his thighs. Lavi could feel the motion of words from Kanda, but he didn't bother to try to understand them. He let his chin slip onto Kanda's collarbone and stayed there with him until he was warm enough to feel human again and doze off.

The next day, Lavi's ass hurt, but he started to organize the information he had from the Noah's notes. It was about time he got back to work anyways.

---

Lavi had been right and the stacks the Noah had left around his place were dismally deep. It was "place", not just "study," because they had marched right out of the room into the halls. Lavi noticed that the ones with a new handwriting--elegant and slanted, not like the boxy letters etched out by cat claws--were especially lengthy. She'd kept her messages terse and rude as an animal, but Noah had wonderful intuition for what would most bother a person at a given time. Lulubell was a bitch through and through. But Lavi took them on gamely and got back to work.

The Noah came in for their visits. Rhode and Tyki teased, but didn't pull off any more stunts. Lavi got the impression that someone had scolded them from disrupting the Bookman at work--maybe Lulu. Maybe even the Earl. Letting someone who was technically human live had been loaded decision for the Noah, after all. All that seriousness would be wasted if Lavi got accidentally broken by one of them, or offed himself from the stresses of their attention.

No one was more surprised than Lavi when Kanda came calling on him after he went back to his own house. Kanda would appear on the path on early evenings, with an umbrella under his arm for the summer rains and lantern swinging in his fist, his regrown hair neatly tied behind him. Lavi had his misgivings at first, but they were unfounded. Kanda would just eat and talk with him, like before. Lavi tried to fend him by being excruciatingly boring ("I'm writing. Can't talk to you for the next few hours."), but this didn't work.

"You got that wrong." Kanda would tell him, reading over his shoulder.

"What?"

"There." And Kanda would put a delicate finger to a line on the page. "Lenalee and Allen didn't get married in the winter of that year. They had the ceremony in early fall."

"…What? That can't be right, the letter they sent me--"

"Komui got a stroke at the end of the August that year. Not a big surprise, the higher ups were putting pressure on him to revive the third program. They moved the date up because they weren't sure he was going to make it. But he did. Said he wouldn't miss the chance to be an uncle for anything in the world."

"I didn't know that."

Kanda shrugged. "Why would you? Lenalee didn't like upsetting other people." he said. And Kanda would take Lavi wetting his hands as a sign to stalk out and get dinner ready.

Finally, one day Lavi gave up on his books and walked into the kitchen with a page he couldn't finish. Kanda had his back to him, meddling with the fire in the stove.

"How long can you keep this up, Yuu?" he demanded. "I know why you're doing this. But what about what you want?"

Kanda tossed chips of wood into the flames one by one.

"What do you mean?"

"You're going to run out of sad stories eventually. What are you going to do then?"

"It's not like that, Lavi." Kanda deflected him absently and he stoked up the heat. "I'm not thinking about anything when I'm with you."

"Really? You always make me think of everyone. Everything. As if the world were still full." Lavi gave him a smile, grim and bitter. "It sucks."

"If you really thought that, you would have told me shut up. But you never did."

"You know I couldn't! That's why you did it. It's a pretty bad act, Yuu. You talking sweet about the others--you've got to be kidding me." Lavi crumpled the sheet he'd been holding and tossed it at Kanda's head. It bounced off. Without a single sign of rage, Kanda deftly picked it up and tossed it in.

"I asked you." Lavi said icily "What you're going to do next."

Satisfied with the fire, Kanda started pulling down pots and pans from Lavi's cupboard. "The same damned thing."

Lavi crossed his arms. "What is the 'same damned thing'?"

"This." As Lavi shook his head in frustration, Kanda placidly continued.

"I like this, I mean. It's fine. Living with you. I like it. I can keep doing it." Kanda said. He frowned suspiciously at the fire, and went back to throw in more fuel.

Lavi didn't say anything back.

---

But that night, Kanda was woken from his sleep when someone slid in behind him and wrapped his arms around him. It was very, very late--or else, very, very early. He'd walked back from Lavi's house back to his and been in bed for a few hours already.

"Lavi?"

"Yeah?" Nothing for a moment. "This is okay, right?" he was asked almost defensively.

Was it?

"…Yes." Kanda decided. "It's fine."

He rolled over. He was amazed at how very aware he was of his own heartbeat. It… it wasn't as if he could tell if it had gotten stronger, or faster. But he knew it was there, and he could feel it.

But before he could do anything, Lavi grabbed his wrists and leaned in quickly. His kiss was swift and shy--like young boy's first time with an older lover. Like, Kanda suddenly remembered, how his first time had been like.

But he couldn't match the face to the memory. It was only a sensation lingering on his lips, which had been left there by Lavi. It was only Lavi's face, which was now staring at him with bright green eyes that looked a little sad and a little ashamed, but also curious and wanting more. As if he could tell what Kanda was thinking, he ducked his head and Kanda could see his blush.

Kanda felt a surge of desire different from the bright, violent rush that had always come before he fucked someone. Tenderness flowed in a slow uneasy trickle, something that made him feel both awkward and excited. He pulled Lavi closer--Lavi shifted slightly, feeling the change in Kanda's anatomy pressing against his thigh. And though he wasn't nearly as hard as Kanda, Kanda could also feel Lavi's body responding against his.

Kanda let go of Lavi's waist and got on top of him, placing his knees on either side of Lavi. Slowly, he lowered himself so that their erections pressed together. Lavi let out a tiny moan.

With a fumbling motion that Kanda wouldn't have believed of himself, considering how easy and effortlessly he had done it countless times before, he pulled Lavi's shirt up to expose his chest and run his hands over it. This was his first time seeing Lavi unclothed---since Christ, when? When they were kids? Had he ever, even then?

Lavi was thin, thinner than he'd ever been in the Order when the training had toned them all. Kanda could see the lines of his ribs. But his muscles were sinewy and defined, and his skin--his skin looked warm and sweet, flush with color despite the season that had made Kanda sun-starved and pale. Lavi's nipples were a dark rose against his skin.

His fingers met a raised, taut line. With a dazed pang, Kanda recognized it as a scar--the one that he had given. He lowered his lips to it. Lavi squirmed at against the feeling of Kanda's mouth on his stomach.

"Oh…" Lavi said as Kanda's lips and tongue traveled upwards. He put his hands on Kanda's shoulders. When Kanda took his nipple in his teeth, Lavi's back lifted from the floor with a small "Ah!"

"Yuu." Lavi was tense. From where he was laying on top of him, Kanda could feel it in his entire body line. "Yuu." he said louder again, as Kanda reached below him into his underwear, hands slipping over his buttocks. Lavi was warm there. When Kanda slid his hand in between, he quickly, eagerly pressed his lips to Lavi's to stop him from jerking away from the touch. With some swipes of his tongue, he soothed Lavi with kissing until Lavi relaxed into the intrusion of Kanda's fingers.

"I won't hurt you." Kanda promised him. This time, he stopped himself from saying in time. Lavi pressed his forehead to his, almost a nod.

"Do you have… anything to make it easier?" Kanda asked him in between kisses. Lavi, he noticed, was clenching pretty hard.

"Ummmm." Lavi twisted his head away, thinking. He'd thought Kanda would, like last time. He pursed his lips in uncertainty as he reached for a small round tin that he'd kept in his pocket. "How about this?" It was an ointment he'd used to soothe the sting of his healing cut. Kanda took his hands out of Lavi's pants to unscrew it and run his fingers over it. It was greasy and slick. Lavi sat up to watch him, balancing on his elbows

Kanda actually removed Lavi's pants this time, freeing a half hard member and exposing Lavi's entrance. Keeping his eyes on Lavi's face, Kanda put one hand on Lavi's knee to coax him to stay open, and eased the other one down. Before entering Lavi again, he gave his penis some strokes and squeezes, eliciting a shiver. He inserted a finger, and then two--from the silence, he knew that Lavi was holding his breath.

"Lavi, relax…It's ok."

"It…hurts." Lavi murmured, almost apologetically. And then he flashed a mischievous grin, something that jolted Kanda back to their youth. Lavi really had been…so bright, and bold--

"This is so weird." Lavi laughed, lying back and raising his hips only a little as Kanda pressed deeper. "I'm not used to being the one prepped." But in the next moment, when Kanda really started to move, Lavi's thighs immediately flew up and gripped Kanda's arm. His playfulness was gone. He didn't know it, but he looked scared. "Ow! Yuu, fuck…! I can't…"

"It'll be fine, Lavi." And then taking a chance, Kanda said "It was fine last time, wasn't it"

"You did it really fast then--"

"And it hurt like hell when I actually went in, right? I'll do it slow this time. It won't hurt as much later--so…" Kanda dropped his voice, saying something he couldn't remember saying before. "…you'll be able to enjoy it."

"That a promise?" Lavi gasped lightly, blowing on that spot of cheer again. But soon enough he was on his back, legs spread and writhing and making noises of discomfort as Kanda worked him open.

Kanda could hear him: his soft "Fuck…no…please, no…" But Lavi didn't draw his legs closed, or try to take away Kanda's hands. Kanda took this as a sign that it was okay for him to keep going. He was right, because when he added a third finger Lavi panted out a strained plea: "Yuu…Yuu, hey…please kiss me…please?"

Kanda knew Lavi needed something to distract him from something that he had definitely not associated with pleasure before. Kanda did him one better and drew Lavi's cock into his mouth, flicking his tongue against the head to taste the precum as he continued to get Lavi ready.

"Wait, I didn't mean--!"he head Lavi exclaim. Kanda jerked his head up from between Lavi's legs for clarification. Lavi seemed to be taken off guard by Kanda's patience with him. "Well, uh…I didn't mean stop… you can um…keep doing it…" he trailed off.

Kanda rolled his eyes and went back to what he was doing. Soon, even with Kanda's fingers thrusting in him hard and fast, Lavi's cock was completely hard and twitching in Kanda's mouth. His breathing was ragged between moans. Kanda expertly pushed down his hip when he started to thrust and pulled up, leaving a trail of saliva on Lavi's skin.

"Lavi, you ready?"

He took so long to reply that Kanda thought (worried?) that he was going to say no. But before he even heard the word, he felt Lavi's warm hand reach over and brush the back of his.

"Yeah…"

It didn't go as smoothly as the first time, as in, Kanda wasn't able to come without interruption. Lavi held out for only a minute or so, his face twisted in intense pain. Then he had to ask Kanda to stop. And Kanda did. He waited until Lavi took a deep breath, wrapped his arms around him, and told him to move again. It happened one more time before Kanda made contact with Lavi's prostrate, which led Lavi grabbing his hand and closing it around his cock. With Kanda jerking him off, Lavi came first. Kanda made him deal with the unpleasantness of continued thrusting until he was able to get off deep inside Lavi's body. Despite this, Lavi gave Kanda only a tiny glare before kissing him and taking his hand as they slept side by side.

So, it was only his best guess the next morning when he woke up with Lavi's fingers still loosely interwoven with his, and the bizarre thought Lavi looked beautiful with half his face buried into the pillow and messy red hair strewn everywhere. But Kanda thought that they might have made love.

--

Some place close to Kanda's replica ancestral home, a Noah was sniffling, pressing her gray cherubic face into her knees. The night sky was as lush with stars as a nativity scene, and from where she sat on the cold hill she could have been a shepherd child about to be visited upon by an angel of good news.

Instead, there was a creak of invisible hinges someone opened a square of space next to her and stepped down with a graceful hop. He had no wings, but when she heard him walking up behind her, she twisted around her waist and flung her arms around his in a flounce of white petticoats. He crouched down to her level and stroked her hair as she clung to him.

"It's tragic." Rhode huffily emphasized the latter word. She pressed her cheek to her brother's chest. There were real tears in her eyes.

"Oh Rhode, my little love. What's troubling you?" Tyki soothed her, stroking her dark hair.

"I'm so bored, Tyki. There's nothing to hurt. There's nothing trying to hurt me. It's so still, and so quiet, and I hate it!" she sobbed softly into his shirt-- such clean white linen, he could have very well been a heavenly messenger. Or a society man. Sometimes they dressed alike.

"It's good. You know that. Nice and peaceful for the babies."

"No!" Rhode whined at him. She clutched at the fine stitching of his front. "Even Lavi-bunny's been boring lately… I said I'd kill the heartless lotus princess for trying to hurt him, but he made go away…And now he turns me away if he's at the castle of the lotus-princess, but if I even look cross-eyed at him, Lavi won't talk to me even when I go to see him at his house! Tyki, what do I doooo~? They both such bores!"

"Actually, I think they're quite interesting."

Rhode's lip trembled. She was looking for a shred of hope to salvage from this mess.

"That exorcist was the best out all the Order with a sword, yes?"

"Yes."

"Very interesting then, that he came at the Bookman from the side, instead of running him through--a nice clean, killing motion. Is that a coincidence?"

"They were friends." Rhode pouted. "Lavi said so. I know when I think about killing you, Tyki honey, I just can't keep my head straight."

"Maybe." Tyki allowed affably. "But look at this. The Bookman tried to keep a man alive to kill him. The man feinted killing him so he could find out that a greater punishment would be for the Bookman to live. But by forcing the Bookman to live in guilt, the man found that his own suffering was eased. And in turn, he eased the Bookman's suffering."

"So?" Rhode asked querulously.

"So few things have such a neat endpoint, Rhode dear. We're humans and Noah--cycles are in our blood. Suffering forces the hand of the victim to deal a greater blow. They've somehow gotten to equilibrium. Incredible, isn't it? It makes for a good story…"

Rhode certainly did look incredulous as she tilted her chin up like a baby bird to meet Tyki's face. Then she threw him off, falling back in a poof of netted white lace.

"Who cares, who cares, who cares?!" Rhode chanted, her temper in perfect three-fourths time. "Lavi-bunny's never going to be fun again! If we try to play with him, he'll just think about his lotus princess--but if we do anything to _him_, Lavi won't play with us again either! "

"We can still watch whenever we want." Tyki offered, deadpan serious. "They're not bad at it, actually. And since they switch, it doesn't get boring." Rhode was not very receptive to this consolation prize.

"You're being gross again, Tyki!" she fumed.

"Well--"

She threw an accusatory finger in his handsome face. The black nail was like an arrow pointing to the smirk lining his mouth.

"You're thinking with your human heart again, aren't you? 'It makes a good story' … Disgusting!"

"Well, isn't that the pot calling the kettle black." Tyki retorted coolly. "Are you sure you're ready to be a big sister again, if you can't get over your little games? Better not tell the Earl that."

Rhode shot up on her party-shoe heel. Pushing past Tyki with a brusque brush of tulle, she climbed up a few gravel-loosening steps before making a violent yank at the air. The door she created was a thing of obscene beauty--all harsh reds, blacks, and gold, cast into roses and hearts. It was unseemly in the setting of serene natural beauty. A piece of baroque furniture dropped into a landscape painting.

"No fun at all!" she stuck her tongue out at him as she slammed the velvet-paned door in his face.

Tyki shook his head. The thing about being as old as humanity itself, and the special favorite of its tempter for just as long, Rhode had always been indulged. Humans in her world had always been the toys in her toy chest to amuse herself with as she wished. Oh, she'd long played at being a "big girl" who didn't really _need_ them--look at her, helping in daddy's workshop to make the puppets! But now that the patriarch had decided that he didn't need the clutter in his house, he'd emptied it out and the child was bawling from the loss.

The Bookman's human side, and his lover, had been like the last toys that the father's sweep had missed, and Rhode had loved them dearly for it. Mementos of childhood. But Tyki had spent too much time as a human to be won over by such a silly simple idea. He saw it as it really stood. Rhode needed to get over her sense of entitlement and stop sulking about not having humans to play with anymore. Their children were coming from the egg soon. Raising them would be serious business.

And, well. If Rhode were a good older sister, she would be more gracious, and accept that all her things belonged to the youngest children now. The Bookman included. They needed a schoolmaster more than she needed a release for her perverse pleasures.

The Earl needed his daughter to stop being a child and help him with greater things. Princess becomes employee in family business. Maybe a tragedy to some, but not to Tyki's aesthetic.

"…Baby!" Tyki called meanly after her.

--

One day, Kanda was going through the last day's dishes as Lavi ate breakfast at the table. They were at his house.

"I'd like to find out about what happened to a certain person." he said suddenly. Lavi looked up from his plate at Kanda's back. "I was thinking about leaving."

"Oh." Lavi said back simply.

"Just 'oh?"

"Yeah. Sure. I'll come with you." Lavi answered agreeably. He put his spoon back in his food.

"I don't want you to come."

"Still. I'll come with."

"I'll abandon you while we're traveling."

"I'll get the Noah to bring you back."

"Maybe I don't care. Maybe I'll try to fight them and they'll kill me. And then you can be alone with them, like it was supposed to be." Kanda suggested. The corners of his mouth might have been quirking.

When Kanda turned around, Lavi's head was buried in his arms, one laid down on the table, the other one wrapped around his skull.

"Yuu, can't you make this any easier?" he spoke through the muffler of his own flesh.

"You think you deserve it?"

"Fine." Lavi got up. He took his dishes to the sink and dumped them in a noisy clatter. "Do what you want." He stalked off in the direction of the hallway. Kanda quickly twisted the tap shut and went after him.

"Lavi!" Kanda grabbed Lavi's shoulder. Water and suds dripped off his hand and left wet streaks on Lavi's shirt. "We were joking. Both of us. You knew that. We should be past this shit by now, we--"

He was promptly dealt a neat uppercut to the jaw. Kanda fell back into the wall. As he grimly rubbed his face, it occurred to him that Lavi had never forgotten how to land a good punch from his basic hand-to-hand training. That was going to leave a mark.

"Asshole!" Lavi snapped at him. "Don't bother me, I'm going to work!" He went into his study and pulled the door shut after himself. There was the sound of papers being moved with unnecessary force. Kanda waited an appropriate amount of time before knocking. No answer, but he had expected that.

"Lavi! Can you get me some seeds and gardening tools?" he called through the wood. There was another rustle, stiff with anger, but nothing else.

Kanda nearly fell into him when Lavi suddenly yanked the door open again. By the look of his face, he hadn't come out to make peace.

"What the hell for?" he threw down abruptly. Kanda could feel the place where he had been hit throbbing as he spoke.

"For a garden, obviously."

"A garden? I don't want a goddamned garden! What, you thought I'd want to frolic in daisies and roses or something?"

Kanda was reminded of Lenalee yelling at Allen over family planning. He resolved to remind himself to do a thousand push ups later in the dojo to get that out his head.

"I meant a vegetable garden." he nevertheless kept the conversation/fight going.

"I don't want that either! I don't have time to be a goddamned dirt farmer."

"Lavi, calm the fuck down. It's for me, alright? You don't have to do shit." One might not have thought this the most considerate reply, but it was. Kanda had ever let someone talk to him like this without retribution before. It wasn't that he didn't have the urge to hit Lavi. He just held it back for the first time ever.

"Fine! Like I said, do what you want. I can't be babysitting you all the time anyways!" Lavi shouted, glowering. Then he blinked. "Wait, why do you want a garden? I never got the impression that it was hobby of yours or anything."

"Lavi…"Kanda said impatiently. This was just like him. Taking simple things and turning it into a gigantic shit storm. "It's been more than two years already. We're not getting many fresh supplies anymore--just canned things. Maybe the akuma can't find things where they used to anymore. Or they just not trying as hard. Either way, we've got a problem."

"Oh." Lavi deflated, the way he always did when someone noticed something he hadn't. It didn't matter if it was in his realm of expertise or not. Common sense, Kanda had figured, counted as "not". "I don't know…I never thought to ask the Noah about it…"

"I think you're used to eating crap anyways since you always lock yourself up working. Maybe that's why you didn't realize. But I don't want to have to do it if I don't have to. Besides." Kanda reached out without thinking to smooth out the strands of hair sticking out in Lavi's bed-head. "No matter what lip you give me about things being the way they are, and just getting used to it--I'm never going to like depending on Noah or akuma. Couldn't deal with it even when it was just humans."

"Yuu…" Lavi was at a loss for words.

"We could use some chickens or something too. I'll figure it out. Never did a single thing for the villagers when I was a kid, but I know the theory." There was the tiniest trace of a flush in Kanda's right cheek.

At Lavi's unrestrained gaping, he sighed. "What else am I going to do? I've got nothing but time here."

Kanda could feel himself freezing up all the way to the base of his spine when Lavi threw his arms around him. "You're so cute, Yuu."

"Okay, okay…Get off me."

"No."

Kanda belted him. He went to the dojo. Lavi went back to work. They got into bed together and touched each other before going to sleep.

And life went on.

---

Author's Notes:

I edited some chunks out of the previous chapter if you want to look at that.

A kaishakunin is the dude who assists with a seppuku. Usually a close friend or comrade.

I (try) to write realistic sex. Sometimes it's weird. Sometimes it hurts. It helps when your partner cares, but that's not a cure-all. Sex involves two bodies coming together, and like all mechanical systems, sometimes there are technical difficulties. Simple love will not overcome total lack of experience and make everything awesome right away-- so take a lesson from Lavi and Kanda about talking through it, and practice! J

Okay, mini unsexy lecture on sex over.

Anyways. This was a serious lesson to me that I should write endings first. I really enjoyed writing the parts when the Order still existed, with Kanda and Lavi interacting with their respective colleagues. But once they were alone together, it was just hard coherently explain, even to myself, how that would work exactly.

I'd written everything else on the assumed scenario that Kanda and Lavi would be kissy-kissy at the end. You know, living together, something deep and soulful about how the both chose to live for each other at the end of the world. The verbal "I love you" was supposed to make an appearance. Everything was supposed to lead up to that. But it just didn't feel right--now they're either thinking it without telling each other, or fell into the natural behavior after "…I don't want to die old and alone" occurred to them separately. After all, they should be in the mid-thirties at the end of this.

So they may be friends-who-are-lovers-and-love-each-other. Or something. I think I'm OK with that. I hope you guys are too. Writer's block lulz handed me what it did.

I don't usually do this, but it really would mean a lot to me if you reviewed this one, even if you don't usually leave them. I spent a lot of time trying to make this conclude meaningfully. I knew I had it in me to finish it, but sometimes I had motivation to stop myself from dropping it other than knowing that someone, somewhere, might want to know what happens to them. I'm not happy with how it turned out, but you guys can point out where you feel the last part is lacking, maybe I can go back and fix it.

Thank you so much for the faves and previous reviews that helped me see a project through. ---Bow--

The titles of the chapters and the overall fic was inspired by the song

Home by Intercept

Phone calls and photographs

Songs from a better year

Summer nights and hotel rooms,

Memories of emptiness

We can be happy here

Til' you asked if I'm brave, am I fast, am I strong

No no not at all

And I wait for you and I don't know why

Maybe you're a friend of mine

Maybe you're alone somewhere

And I pray for you and I don't know why

Maybe I'd be better off thinking of someone who--

Doesn't laugh the way that you laugh

Or move the way you move

Or dream the way that you dream about finding somebody new

Won't you come take me home?--

Won't you come take me home?--

Wait wait wait is the last thing I wanted to say

You can't mean that, I'm certain

You're killing this way

I'd be happy to burn

For special new drinks

With some poetry candles and lies

And I'll wait for you and I don't know why

Maybe I'd be better off

Thinking of someone who--

Might be right here to me

While I'm sitting here writing to you--

Won't you come take me home?--

Won't you come take me home?--

Oooo Yeah.

Won't you come take me home?

---

It's quite pretty. You can find it on Youtube.


End file.
